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. [Read more…]

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is an awkward film. Some regard it as a classic of its genre, others as a weaker entry in director John Ford’s oeuvre. Though the cast includes much of the familiar Ford “stock company,” somehow the magic of his earlier films is missing. But it did manage to produce a line of dialogue that has become famous (or infamous): “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

The main story is presented as a flashback, wrapped by opening and closing scenes taking place years afterward. The famous line, spoken during the closing scene by a newspaper editor who has just listened to Senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) tell the story behind his rise to prominence, implies that what is portrayed in the flashback has been “truth,” in contrast to the “legend” the editor has always believed. But a close viewing of the movie leaves one wondering—what if the “truth” of the flashback is half-truth at best?

For starters, “Print the legend” didn’t come from the pen of Montana-bred Dorothy M. Johnson, author of the short story on which the film is based. When you read the story, it seems that very little of the film script actually did. In the original story, Ransom Foster (Stoddard in the film) is not a passionately idealistic young lawyer revolted by the lawlessness of the West—nor is Liberty Valance the hired gun of faceless cattlemen who are trying to manipulate political processes in their favor through strong-arm tactics. Foster/Stoddard is merely a reckless young man drifting the West, who happens to have read law in the past (that fact is not of major importance in the story) and Liberty Valance is a common outlaw who bullies the tenderfoot Foster because it’s in his nature to do so. In the original story the conflict between them is personal—the political conflict that takes center stage in the film adaptation is wholly a creation of the screenwriters.

In a final bit of irony, in the story Ranse loses his first campaign for public office because the opposition makes much of his having shot a man in a gunfight…instead of immediately riding to glory on the basis of having shot Liberty Valance, as in the film.

Confusion

In my opinion, the film version of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance suffers from what authors today call poor worldbuilding. We’re presented with a cattleman-homesteader conflict, told that the cattlemen are fighting against statehood for the territory in order to preserve the open range, and that the townspeople of Shinbone are strongly on the side of statehood. But from their appearance and various scraps of dialogue, many of them confusingly appear to be cowboys and ranchers themselves. Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), the primary representative of the Westerner in the film, identifies with the homesteader/statehood party, but seems to be a rancher on a small scale himself. (In spite of their fairly rugged appearance, the townspeople also exhibit the chronic inability to deal with intimidating outlaws that we discussed in the last post.) Liberty Valance is our antagonist, but if he has any driving motivation, it seems to be chiefly his own love of cruelty and bullying. Yet he’s been presented as a henchmen of the unseen cattlemen, who are thus identified with him as evil.

Even the ultimate solution to everyone’s problems seems to contradict itself, with Ranse Stoddard being presented as a champion of law and order, but Tom Doniphon’s brand of practical “frontier justice” turning out to be the only thing that can preserve Stoddard’s life, and by extension everything he stands for. If the message is meant to be that both are required, it doesn’t come across very clearly. [Read more…]