Friday | November 24, 2017 9:30 pm

Yellow Sky

Screening on Film

Directed by William Wellman.
With Gregory Peck, Anne Baxter, Richard Widmark.
US, 1948, 35mm, black & white, 99 min.
Print source: HFA

Wellman continues his late-1940s experiments in fusing the Western and film noir with this tale of a band of bank robbers fleeing into a forbidding desert only to take refuge in a ghost town. Tensions in the gang are exacerbated, however, by the discovery that the ruins are inhabited by an elderly gold prospector and his spirited daughter. Wellman trades the claustrophobia of The Ox-Bow Incident for wide-open vistas that he proceeds to stylize with hints of expressionist disorientation using extreme close-ups and canted camera angles.