Not Coming to a Theater Near You
There are things you do hate, Lord. Perfume-smellin’ things, lacy things, things with curly hair.
There are things you do hate, Lord. Perfume-smellin’ things, lacy things, things with curly hair.
Watching the early scenes of Yellow Sky you can see why cinematographer Joe MacDonald has such a reputation. These luminous black-and-white images are exquisitely beautiful as they follow the small-town robbery carried out by Gregory Peck’s vicious band of bandits (sidekick Richard Widmark is at his cruel and callous late-forties best), the escape across the desert (which puts Ford’s equivalent scenes in Three Godfathers to shame), and the arrival in an almost-deserted abandoned mining town. Granted there’s a conventionality about Anne Baxter’s teenage tomboy in blue jeans (and especially how the film positions her as just waiting for the right man to “feminise” here), and similarly we wait for the inevitable scene which will “humanise” Peck’s supposedly ruthless gang leader and put him on the side of the angels. But the classic contours of this struggle between right and wrong are very satisfying, Wellman stages some great scenes around the water hole (the men’s lust for this young girl is palpable), and there’s a graceful and elegant restraint to the way the climactic three-way gun duel is staged entirely off-camera.
by Ian Johnston | Source: DVD
27 May 2008 12:23 PM | Submit Comment
