Nice effects though.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

It is very easy to label an old film featuring well known, even great actors and made by an able director as a classic when it is far from it and Yellow River is it.The film is routine, confused and contradictory. Maybe if it was made in the 1960s during the era of the counterculture it would had made more sense.The film features a gang of bank robbers led by Gregory Peck who ride into a small town that has only Anne Baxter and her grandfather who have found and hid gold and are forced to share it with the gang but the gang soon turn on each other and Peck wants to do the decent thing with the two people whose lives they have entered. Its clear early on he is attracted to Baxter and sparks might fly.Of course the gang of bad men in a town with one beautiful cowgirl gives you an uneasy feeling especially as one of them has loathsome desires for her and is willing to force himself on Baxter. The others are cyphers but its Richard Widmark who is the only one to rival Peck who stands out as the one who wants the gold all for himself if it came to it and not happy that Peck wants to make sure that Baxter and her grandfather get their share of the gold.How some of the gang switch sides is unconvincing, even Peck's motives are unclear although it might be more to the fact that he is Gregory Peck so he cannot be a complete rotter.The film is a diversion, nice to see actors such as Widmark and Harry Morgan is early roles but it is below par and wrestling with the Hays Code did it no favours.

Yellow Sky is a unusual, moody and magnificent western. I had never heard of it previously and I'm surprised it doesn't have a much higher profile. Six bank robbers on the verge of death after escaping a posse, stumble upon a ghost town inhabited by an old man and his granddaughter. They realise that they may have an opportunity to all make a fortune however group dynamics and greed take over. It makes a change from the usual western plot but this isn't the only thing that makes this film stand well above most of it's peers. The setting is great and the filming is top class with some great cinematography. The acting is excellent from all the cast. I'm not a massive fan of Gregory Peck but he is outstanding in this as the morally ambiguous leader of the gang. There is an early appearance from Richard Widmark and Anne Baxter is captivating as the feisty granddaughter. The brilliant and convincing script sparkles despite there not being an awful lot of gun play. The characters are all interesting and I liked the fact they weren't all clichéd, a failing of many westerns. Considering what has gone before the very ending is maybe a little too twee but this is a minor gripe as the rest of the film is so good. One of the best and most enjoyable westerns I've seen to date and one which is comparable to most of the perceived classic westerns.

My review title sums up the final conflict between the plans of fellow outlaw gang members Dude(Widmark) and Stretch(Peck) in regard to the bags of gold dust that Grandpa and wildcat gunslinger granddaughter Mike have been saving up for many years. Actually, I'm only assuming , from the friendly gathering on horses in the last scene, that Stretch, and probably his partners Half Pint and Walrus, have made amends with grandpa and Mike, and have decided to stay and participate in the hard rock mining of probably a moderate amount of gold near this otherwise ghost town of Yellow Sky. Also, I'm assuming that Stretch and Mike will probably get 'hitched'.At it's peak, this outlaw gang boasted 7 men. One was shot dead by the cavalry that chased these bank robbers to the edge of a vast salt flats, hemmed in by a high mountain range on either side(filmed in Death Valley). The commander remarked that if they tried to cross this waterless hellishly hot flats and then sand dunes, that would save the justice system the trouble of hanging them. He was very nearly correct in this assessment. The men and their horses were near death when they chanced upon Yellow Sky at the far edge. At first, they assumed there was no water in this apparent ghost town. But soon, a tough-talking , rifle-totting, young woman(Mike) decided to show them a spring. This decision would come to haunt her, as soon Dude, who was jockeying with Stretch for leadership of the gang, correctly guessed that the two were surviving here by finding some gold. After a powwow with the two, Stretch offers a deal. The gang would split the gold 50-50 with the two. Grandpa decided to accept this deal as the best way out, despite Mike's objection. But, the outlaws had to dig through the rubble of a collapsing mine shaft to get to it. After finding it, the outlaws disagreed as to whether to take it all or stick to their bargain. Only Stretch voted for the latter. A shootout ensued, with Mike eventually joining Stretch. Later, Dude decides he will try to run off alone with all the booty. When the others find out about this, Half Pint and Walrus switch sides, and the others try to kill Dude before he disappears. You can more or less guess how things turn out from then. Just before the final scene, there is a rather humorous scene where Stretch, Half Pint and Walrus enter the bank they robbed, pull out their guns, and return all the money they stole(presumably using some of the gold dust to replace that which had been lost or spent.) I would have included some substantial 'interest' to mitigate any lingering hostility about the robbery. Just before this scene, we have Mike discovering Stretch unconscious and barely breathing, from a bullet wound. Seems like he should have soon died, but obviously she revived him.This B&W film was mostly shot on location in the Alabama Hills , near Lone Pine, CA, which provided the ghost town and lots of big boulders and arches to play hide and seek among. Death Valley provided the extensive salt flat and probably the sand dunes. The name Yellow Sky may be derived from Stephen Cranes story "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky": the latter being a town in frontier Texas.Death Valley also provided the extensive salt flats and rugged country seen in the Technicolor John Ford western "3 Godfathers", starring John Wayne, also released in '48. Again, it's a tale of an unlikely opportunity for redemption, after a small gang of bank robbers ride onto the salt flats to escape a posse, and die or nearly so before reaching help.Veteran vaudevillian and actor James Barton made an excellent 'Grandpa', with 'Santa' charisma. Otherwise, I've seen him in a few musicals. John Russell, as horny badman Lengthy, went on to star in some TV serials, including "Lawman". Charles Kemper, as rotund Walrus, often played a sheriff in westerns. But I most remember him as the head of the sinister Clegg gang in "Wagon Master". Anne Baxter makes a convincing tomboy wildcat, knocking Stretch off his feet with a punch, after he grabbed her rifle. Widmark is OK as the wannabe leader of the pack, often at odds with Stretch. In contrast to the others, he seems to know this country intimately. Stretch is from the frontier Midwest, where he has participated in pre and actual Civil War violence. What about the character of Stretch? When it comes to protecting the virtue of the leading lady, he's clearly a hypocrite. He emphasized that the gang, including him, should not mess with her. Yet, on the sly, he grabs her, rolls around with her, lands on top of her, extracting a couple of hard kisses before she brushes him off as "stinking worse than Apaches", and grazes his head with a bullet for good measure. Eventually, she becomes accepting of his advances. In contrast, handsome Lengthy wears his horniness on his sleeve, beginning with that revealing cartoon on the saloon wall,Viewable on YouTube, at present

Director William Wellman is a clever and innovative guy. Who else would shoot a scene of hoodlums racing their horses away from a bank robbery with the camera placed only a few feet to the side of one horse's legs, almost at ground level, with the other hoodlums visible through the flashing legs of the nearest galloping horse? That takes a kind of reckless talent. You can't help wondering what the camerman was being paid.On the other hand, the script itself, while suspenseful, is a bit routine and sometimes contradictory. The handful of bank robbers led by Peck, establish their bona fides early. There's the fat drunk, the would-be rapist, the naive homesick boy, the greedy gambler (Widmark), and the disheveled but fundamentally decent leader.The dimensions are doled out piece by piece, the way the gang divides the gold they discover in the ghost town of Yellow Sky. Well, it's not entirely a ghost town since Anne Baxter and her Grandpa live there still, having dug up all that gold. The presence of the hip-swinging woman confuses everybody except the would-be rapist, who knows exactly what he wants, in addition to his share of the stolen loot.Yet, the script is confusing too. Here's Harry Morgan -- Detective Bill Gannon or Colonel Sherman T. Potter, if you like -- "Half Pint" in this movie. The gang is stranded in the middle of a vast blazing salt flat with practically no water. It was shot in Death Valley before the company moved to the more comfortable venue of the Alabama Hills, locally called Movie Flats. The thirsty would-be rapist is angry. He might die and be skeletalized in the middle of nowhere. He points to a lizard and complains that even that lizard (Dipsosaurus dorsalis) will outlive him, so he shoots the lizard. Harry Morgan slouches towards him, ready for a fist fight, and says "that lizard wasn't doing you no harm." In other words Morgan has a kind heart. Yet he turns just as cruel and greedy as the others before, at the very end, giving up his villainous ways for no particular reason.It's a longish movie, strung out, and unnerving in the way it shows us the disintegration of the bank robbing community, although there's never much doubt about which way things will turn. (That naive kid was dead meat the moment he maundered on about his folks back in Ohio and developed a crush on Anne Baxter. A thousand years ago, when last names were being handed out for tax purposes, "Baxter" was the feminine form of "Baker". The voices told me to just throw that in.) Peck and Baxter accidentally bump into each other one night in the barn. They don't exactly wrestle with their passions; they immediately get all hormonal, Bartholin's glands become gushers, even though there has been so set up whatever or the scene.Wellman is no poet but he's a craftsman and has an eye for composition. The script may have kinks in it and enter the doldrums from time to time, but it's hard to criticize Wellman's handling of the material. Look at what he managed to do with "Battlefield," a movie about combat shot almost entirely on a sound stage.