Friday | February 14, 2014 9:30 pm

The Hanging Tree

Screening on Film

Directed by Delmer Daves.
With Gary Cooper, Maria Schell, Karl Malden.
US, 1959, 35mm, color, 106 min.
Print source: HFA

The Hanging Tree, the most unsettling of Delmer Daves’ three great Westerns – with Broken Arrow and Jubal – offers stunning takes of a magnificent landscape, as mountainous and jagged as the greed and madness of the characters who hardly exist within it. The panoramics of this noir Western study the sweeping force of mob violence in a plot rife with characters marked by trauma and blindness both figural and real. The landscapes of the troubled faces of characters at odds with each other counterpoint those of the mining town with which they are at war.