The Way of the Western, Part IV: "Yellow Sky" (1948) and the Ambivalence of Film Noir

Watching Yellow Sky (1948) was an odd experience. For the first time I could remember, when I reached the end of a movie I couldn't decide whether I actually liked it or not. I recorded some extensive musings in my journal at the time (March 2016) on why that was—most of this post is drawn from those journal entries where I put down thoughts as they came, so any sense of meandering or following tangents here is likely owing to that.

The Plot

After a successful bank robbery, an outlaw gang led by Stretch (Gregory Peck) shakes off a posse's pursuit via a long, harrowing journey across a barren desert. Nearly dead of thirst, they find refuge and water on the other side in the abandoned mining town of Yellow Sky, whose sole inhabitants are a lone old man (James Barton) and his tough, tomboyish granddaughter (Anne Baxter). Before long the outlaws tumble to the fact that the pair must have a reason for living out here, and that the reason must be a hidden stash of gold. They promptly decide they'll have a share of that too, and set out to force the old man and the girl into revealing its hiding-place.

During this time various conflicts come into play among the gang members. Cold, calculating gambler Dude (Richard Widmark) watches his chance to make a power play, especially since he has no intention of letting Stretch indulge an inclination to see that the old man and his granddaughter are left with a fair share of the gold; brutish Lengthy (John Russell) has his eye on the girl. The remaining outlaws' allegiance wavers back and forth depending on who seems to have the upper hand at the moment. Eventually, after Stretch openly declares his intention to see a fair division of the gold, matters come to a showdown amongst them.

Again, ’ware spoilers, including for some other movies I'll be dragging into it.

Like 3:10 to Yuma, in an artistic sense Yellow Sky is excellent. The stunning black-and-white cinematography and the crisp direction by William Wellman (whose movies always manage to impress me in some way) are a pleasure, and the cast's performances are all good. But as far as story goes, I had a very hard time liking any of the characters, even the leads played by Peck and Baxter whom we're supposed to find sympathetic. The old love-hate romance angle requires thorough suspension of disbelief, and they sometimes make decisions that seem just plain idiotic (for Pete's sake, girl, just send Grandpa to the spring for water and stay away from the outlaws!).

Of course, it was a foregone conclusion that Peck's outlaw Stretch would reform by the end. But with the rest of the supporting cast, a curious sense of irresolution pervades the whole film. I kept waiting for a decisive moment when someone would finally show a streak of honest humanity, or when the pressure of circumstances would finally make everyone show their true colors one way or the other. But it didn't really happen—the indeterminate lesser gang members remain in limbo, showing only weak flashes of either craven selfishness or a very slight leaning toward decency, but not enough to either wholly condemn or redeem them.

A number of critics have complained about the ending of Yellow Sky, mainly because of its tone being too cheerful or because of its portraying our tomboy heroine embracing femininity. I had a completely different criticism: the casual leniency with which the surviving minor outlaws are treated. Sure, they haven't actually committed any egregious crime, since their attempted mutiny failed; but that's not through any merit of their own. It's mainly because their shots missed. And there are really no redeeming qualities about the characters themselves. They are infinitely less appealing than, say, the characters of Howard and Curtin in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, who in a slightly similar way are saved from participating in a murder by a deus ex machina.  Curtin has already passed the test of one temptation to do evil earlier in the film, and even though he fails the second, I've always felt that his demeanor during the letter-reading scene afterwards shows him as ashamed of what they were about to do, and that if he'd read the letter first he wouldn't have voted in favor of the murder.

The outlaws of Yellow Sky, on the other hand, seem to wind up innocent of greater crimes merely because they didn't have the guts to pull them off successfully. I think the ending should at the very least have shown them taking a different trail than the others, because I don't see them all happily going straight together after the kind of betrayal they'd attempted. An outlaw boss might accept failed mutineers slinking back to his side like whipped dogs, but not a man bent on forging an honest career from henceforward. I don't see him trusting them.

Film Noir

I'd unhesitatingly class Yellow Sky as Western film noir. Which begs the question, what is film noir? I know little of the genre personally but a good deal at second-hand, and the nutshell view I've formed of it is: striking and even beautiful in visuals, but dark, cynical and frequently hopeless in story and theme. Perhaps the real question is—is noir an attempt to visually beautify what's essentially ugly?

I like a bit of noir's surface aesthetic as well as anyone on occasion—its striking use of light and shadow, a bit of its hard-boiled streetlights-and-fedoras atmosphere, a dash of its suspense and angst; but I suspect I'm essentially out of tune with its underlying pessimism. Hence my ambivalence toward Yellow Sky where the characters are basically depraved and at best anti-heroic. I can digest a dash of dark atmosphere on occasion if there's at least one character of strong integrity who emerges from the darkness intact, but you don't get that often with anti-heroes.

Perhaps the out-of-tune-ness is because noir and its anti-heroes are forever going up and down the dark streets with unanswered questions, whereas my Christian worldview is by nature an answer rather than a question. As Martyn Lloyd-Jones put it, "Christians have ceased to be seekers and enquirers; they are men and women who have ceased to doubt." In that case, storytelling that fails to answer the questions it poses (or to give sound reasons for its characters' choice of good or evil) will always come across as unsatisfying.

I think a good example of a noir (or noir-ish) film with a more positive resolution is The Third Man—where the protagonist, despite his flaws and weaknesses, comes out of the story better than he was because he grimly hung on and did what he was persuaded was the right thing. Though it's not a traditional happy ending in the sense that the protagonist doesn't get everything he wanted, one gets a sense that he has learned from his experiences and is a wiser and perhaps a stronger man than he was before. Yellow Sky, on the other hand, has a bit of the same problem I noted with both Four Faces West and 3:10 to Yuma: a character predictably "reforming" merely through a vague inner instinct toward decency—not because he's been forced to confront and acknowledge his own wrongdoing before making a conscious choice to change.

In one respect the script of Yellow Sky could be called a success, because it did defy some of my expectations of cliché; aside from the predictable arc of Peck's character, it really kept me guessing what would happen next. But if you could combine that quality of suspense and unexpectedness with a stronger sense of integrity and resolution like I've been talking about, then you would have a real crackerjack of a story.

Westerns and Noir

Can a Western be a film noir? Sure it can. You can tell any story in a noir style if you want to. But for the purposes of this blog series, the question is: does the noir approach that crept into many late-40s and '50s Western movies have any relation at all to the real American West?

When I think back over the history and pre-1930s Western fiction that I've read, I'm hard-pressed to find something with a mood similar to Yellow Sky. Danger, hardship, drama, certainly. Victorian-style melodrama, oh yes. But very little of the morbid, anti-heroic cynicism, despair and angst that you find in noir fiction or film. You're much more likely to find a mood of irreverent, cheeky humor and determined optimism in the face of danger and hardship. Historian and author W.H. Hutchinson, considering the question of why a writer such as Eugene Rhodes has been overlooked by serious critics, made the keen observation that "the frontier forgot to be joyless"—as plenty of other earlier writers besides Rhodes, also largely forgotten by the mainstream, have demonstrated in their recollections and stories.

Is the style in which one chooses to tell a story irrelevant? I don't think so. Much as I may find the noir style entertaining, I think its invasion of the Western film genre was just one more element that helped to blur and distort the picture of a previous century in the eyes of modern filmgoers.

Next time: Conclusion to the series.