The Worst Film Ever

Fantastic!

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

"Yellow Sky" is an uneven black and White western that has the look and feel of a "film noire".A gang of outlaws headed by James "Stretch Dawson" and including gambler "Dude" (Richard Widmark), Bull Run (Robert Arthur), Lengthy (John Russell), Half Pint (Harry Morgan), Walrus (Charles Kemper) and Jed (Robert Adler), ride into a dusty town and rob the local bank. While fleeing the sheriff's posse, Jed is killed and the others head for the salt flats/desert.Against all odds, the group comes upon the ghost town, Yellow Sky. There they meet the feisty young "Mike" (a pistol packing Anne Baxter) and her Grampa (James Barton). Dude is the first to suspect that the pair are hiding something. He discovers a gold mine and with the others plans to steal the booty.Meanwhile the normally stern Stretch takes a liking to "Mike". He negotiates with Grampa to share the gold 50/50. However Dude and the others have no such plan to share the loot. Stretch too plans to double cross the old man. But when he sees Grampa talking with visiting Apaches and convincing them not to attack, he sees that the old timer plans to keep his part of the bargain and therefore he will keep his part.A showdown between Stretch and the others results in Dude and the others taking over. The others pin Stretch, "Mike" and Grampa in the old man's cabin.This film has all the trappings of a "Film Noire" complete with low light B &W photography, many nighttime scenes, a dark murky landscape and a sort of "femme fatale" in the person of the "Mike" character. The biggest problem I have with this story is the cop out Hollywood ending. The film should have ended with the climatic shoot-out.Gregory Peck is as always, the stern leader of men which makes the ending of the movie a little hard to swallow. Widmark, who was just starting out makes the perfect double crossing oily villain. Anne Baxter in tight jeans and carrying a six shooter...what else is there to say.

Director William Wellman is a clever and innovative guy. Who else would shoot a scene of hoodlums racing their horses away from a bank robbery with the camera placed only a few feet to the side of one horse's legs, almost at ground level, with the other hoodlums visible through the flashing legs of the nearest galloping horse? That takes a kind of reckless talent. You can't help wondering what the camerman was being paid.On the other hand, the script itself, while suspenseful, is a bit routine and sometimes contradictory. The handful of bank robbers led by Peck, establish their bona fides early. There's the fat drunk, the would-be rapist, the naive homesick boy, the greedy gambler (Widmark), and the disheveled but fundamentally decent leader.The dimensions are doled out piece by piece, the way the gang divides the gold they discover in the ghost town of Yellow Sky. Well, it's not entirely a ghost town since Anne Baxter and her Grandpa live there still, having dug up all that gold. The presence of the hip-swinging woman confuses everybody except the would-be rapist, who knows exactly what he wants, in addition to his share of the stolen loot.Yet, the script is confusing too. Here's Harry Morgan -- Detective Bill Gannon or Colonel Sherman T. Potter, if you like -- "Half Pint" in this movie. The gang is stranded in the middle of a vast blazing salt flat with practically no water. It was shot in Death Valley before the company moved to the more comfortable venue of the Alabama Hills, locally called Movie Flats. The thirsty would-be rapist is angry. He might die and be skeletalized in the middle of nowhere. He points to a lizard and complains that even that lizard (Dipsosaurus dorsalis) will outlive him, so he shoots the lizard. Harry Morgan slouches towards him, ready for a fist fight, and says "that lizard wasn't doing you no harm." In other words Morgan has a kind heart. Yet he turns just as cruel and greedy as the others before, at the very end, giving up his villainous ways for no particular reason.It's a longish movie, strung out, and unnerving in the way it shows us the disintegration of the bank robbing community, although there's never much doubt about which way things will turn. (That naive kid was dead meat the moment he maundered on about his folks back in Ohio and developed a crush on Anne Baxter. A thousand years ago, when last names were being handed out for tax purposes, "Baxter" was the feminine form of "Baker". The voices told me to just throw that in.) Peck and Baxter accidentally bump into each other one night in the barn. They don't exactly wrestle with their passions; they immediately get all hormonal, Bartholin's glands become gushers, even though there has been so set up whatever or the scene.Wellman is no poet but he's a craftsman and has an eye for composition. The script may have kinks in it and enter the doldrums from time to time, but it's hard to criticize Wellman's handling of the material. Look at what he managed to do with "Battlefield," a movie about combat shot almost entirely on a sound stage.

There's a problem with Stretch as a western hero. I don't mind the leading man being conflicted. Wayne, Scott and Stewart often were. But this guy's morality, up to the final scenes, only extends to being prepared to honor a deal to let his victims keep half their property. And he only decides on that after Granpa, for no good reason, has decided to save him from the apaches. It ends with two of his sidekicks, who in the previous scene were happy to attempt to murder Ann Baxter and her gramps for whatever gold they had, turning over a new leaf and handing back their ill gotten loot. For the other two this about turn makes no sense. And the only motive for Stretch seems to be his infatuation with Baxter

William Wellman directed this effective, starkly filmed western that stars Gregory Peck as James 'Stretch' Dawson, leader of a small gang of bank robbers who are fleeing a pursuing cavalry posse when they are forced to traverse an arid salt plains, which severely tasks their resources. When they stumble out of this desert, in dire straits, desperate for water and food, they come into a ghost town called Yellow Sky, where they meet a beautiful but feisty young woman named Constance, or 'Mike'(played by Anne Baxter), who is staying with her grandfather, guarding a gold mine they have been excavating. This gives the robbers(among them actors Richard Widmark as "Dude" and Harry Morgan as "Half Pint") the idea of stealing the gold for themselves, though Stretch refuses, since he has fallen for 'Mike', which leads to a winner-takes-all showdown.Impressive and atmospheric western is quite stylish and well acted, even if the plot is familiar and predictable, it doesn't really take away from this underrated western.