YELLOW SKY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 512, 14 April 1949, Page 14

YELLOW SKY

(20th Century-Fox) ‘Greg tye students of will find in Yellow Sky further evidence of two current Hollywood trends — the Decline of the Western as we understood it in the good old days, and the rise of what looks suspiciously like behaviourism as a substitute for the good old-fashioned five-and-ten-cent psychology to which we have become accustomed. With neither do I find myself in sympathy. Geographically, Yellow Sky is a Western, and a good many of the routine effects of the horse opera (horses, for example, and an echelon of Apache Indians, gun-fights, robbery under arms, and the traditional lone heroine) are to be found in it. But there is, too, a painfully strenuous attempt to be different, to gather -figs from thistles. There are no cowboys (or cows), no rustlers; no one shoots no Injuns. Instead, Gregory Peck, Richard Widmark and _ several

other assorted roughnecks are introduced as flotsam from the Grand Army of the Republic (the year is 1867) intent on their own brand of rehabilitation. This consists of riding westward and holding up banks wherever the opportunity offers. One such opportunity arises shortly after the film opens, when the badmen stick up a small-town bank and decamp with a quantity of Federal greenbacks. This is followed by a good scampering sequence in which they are chivvied at high speed across the Purple Sage by a squadron of frontier cavalry, but the latter. draw rein when they have chased the fugitives on to a vast tract of saltflat and from this point the action tends to get sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought. It is perhaps a slight exaggeration to speak of it as thought. The forces which thereafter determine the behaviour of the protagonists seem to be more the product of glandular disturbance than of rational thought-pro-cesses, and if Professor Pavlov and his Hot Dogs had suddenly appeared over

the Tonto Rim I wouldn’t have felt their presence to be a bit out of place. First of all it’s common or garden thirst. Seventy-five miles across a desert of salt is more than enough to crack the Veneer of Civilisation and reveal the Elemental Urges underneath, and once the veneer is properly cracked the only puzzle is what urge is going to crawl through next. After a frantic struggle, the party staggers out of the salt into the shelter of a mining settlement-only to find that it is deserted, a ghost town. Well, not exactly a ghost town, though it’s on its last legs. The legs belong to a Miner (Forty-Niner) and his daughter (Anne Baxter), and as soon as Miss B’s put in an appearance, albeit chastely clothed in blue jeans, it is obvious that Thirst is not the only elemental urge that has to be contended with. No sooner have the bad boys drunk their fill at the village spring than they begin to look at Miss Baxter in much the same way as they looked at one another’s water-bottles a few short hours before. Then it transpires that the Forty-Niner and his daughter have salted away about

fifty thousand dollars’ worth of gold-dust, and one more elemental urge, the auri sacra fames, adds its savage drive to an already over-driven situation. Obviously nothing short of violence can relieve the tension. There is a free-for-all gunfight in the ruins of the town saloon in which the better element among the bad boys (headed by Mr. Peck of course) neatly eliminates the unregenerate (led by Mr. Widmark), and the way is cleared for a romantic ending. And once Mr. Peck has Miss Baxter and a sizeable cut of her father’s fifty thousand dollars’ worth of gold-dust he doesn’t really need the money so recently pinched from the bank across the salt-flats, so he takes it back and everyone is happy. Everyone, that is, except those who like to believe that men and women live on a somewhat higher plane than that of stimulus-and-response. Yellow Sky does not go quite so far as Duel in the Sun; it is, I suppose, libido ma non troppo, as these things are rated to-day. But I didn’t care for it: I don’t mind salt horse, but I don’t like it served with curry powder.