William A Wellman (1948)
At least I’ll know in future to avoid BFI screenings with an ‘extended’ introduction. Yellow Sky, showing in the ‘Shakespeare on Film’ season, was preceded by a talk by Adrian Wootton, the Chief Executive of Film London. Wootton would be ‘focusing on American Shakespeare adaptations’. Although he assured us that he’d be ‘whizzing through’ each of its several sections, his talk lasted half as long as the film we’d come to see and was focused only in the sense that Wootton had a single point to make. He took forty-five minutes to propose that Hollywood has always done better appropriating Shakespeare-inspired scenarios, for use in Westerns or sci-fi pictures or musicals, than making films of Shakespeare plays. He rather oddly classified the former as ‘Shakespearean’ and the latter as ‘Shakespeare’ and showed a ‘mash-up’ of excerpts from Hollywood ‘Shakespeare’ and Hollywood ‘Shakespearean’. Dominated by the ‘America’ number in West Side Story, this montage included some of the clips included in the trailer for ‘Shakespeare on Film’ that BFI has already been showing for several weeks. The ‘mash-up’ was one of several overlong clips Wootton used to pad things out (one consolation of this was getting the whole of ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’ from Kiss Me Kate). He cited repeated examples of adaptations or reworkings of Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew and The Tempest but was sketchy on why these Shakespeare plays had proved especially capable of reinterpretation in different movie genres. He started off saying that The Tempest was particularly appealing to Americans because of the (brave) New World references in the text. He ended up suggesting the play was popular ‘probably because of the magic’.
All this led, at last, to William Wellman’s supposedly Tempest-inspired Western Yellow Sky. The characters include an elderly man and a young woman living in a largely deserted place – a post-Gold Rush ghost town. Other major points of connection with The Tempest are less obvious. A band of bank-robbing bandit treks through the California desert and eventually makes it to the ghost town. This trek occupies the first third of Yellow Sky. While their problem is a lack rather than a surfeit of water and while Shakespeare didn’t devote an act and a half to the immediate aftermath of the shipwreck of Alonso, Ferdinand et al, the antics of the more roguish of William Wellman’s bandits does remind you that a little of the drunken sailors in The Tempest goes a long way. Fortunately, Yellow Sky is great to look at throughout. Shot in black-and-white by Joe MacDonald, there are impressive chiaroscuro effects and the dusty, windswept terrain is highly atmospheric. Wellman, MacDonald and the editor Harmon Jones put together action sequences that express a thrilling speed of movement. The placing of human bodies in wide open spaces is very arresting – so are the compositions that show two characters facing the camera, one nearly in close-up and unaware of the other standing in the background. The film’s title refers primarily to the name of the ghost town but the sky above the landscape has, even in monochrome, a sulphurous look.
It comes as no surprise that James ‘Stretch’ Dawson, the leader of the gang, turns out to have been born of morally sound stock and that he reverts in due course to honest ways: he’s played by Gregory Peck. No surprise either that the initial hostility between Stretch and Constance Mae (‘Mike’) – the Miranda figure – turns to love. Gregory Peck‘s straightness, both physical and temperamental, works very well in Yellow Sky. He looks about ten feet tall: dressed in black, he can seem threatening; his height also helps confirm the moral stature that Stretch eventually attains. Peck’s deep, sonorous voice assists similarly – it’s capable of implying either menace or underlying nobility, as required. Gregory Peck’s acting can seem a bit wooden in naturalistic drama but he gives depth to the character he’s playing in a stylised genre piece like this one. He’s charming and amusing in Stretch’s prickly courtship with the pistol-packing Mike. Anne Baxter doesn’t show a lot of range in that role but she’s an energetic, insistent presence. Richard Widmark is monotonous as the nastiest piece of work in the band of robbers, who also include Robert Arthur, Charles Kemper, Harry Morgan and John Russell. James Barton is Grandpa (Prospero). Lamar Trotti’s screenplay, with decent dialogue, is adapted from a story by W R Burnett. The climactic shoot-out in Yellow Sky felt overlong to me but I think this was the fault less of William Wellman than of Adrian Wootton.
9 May 2016
