Yellow Sky

Stay away from my men, and stop swinging those damn hips all over the place.

Stretch is the leader of bank robbing desperadoes, after their latest job they find the US Cavalry hot on their tail. Their only conceivable route of escape is to traipse over an enormous salt flat, low on water and bitten by the scorching sun, they happen to come across a ghost town named Yellow Sky. Here was once a prosperous town, now the only inhabitants are a crusty old prospector and his tomboy granddaughter. Soon the talk turns to hidden gold and it's not long before these desperate men will become conflicted in more ways than one. Be it greed, lust or the Apache, the day of reckoning is coming to Yellow Sky.

Yellow Sky is a technically stunning pictu...

Lost men in the Old West willing to kill over lucre and lust

In 1867, a band of bank robbers (Gregory Peck, Richard Widmark, Harry Morgan, etc.) flee through the salt flats of the desert Southwest and stumble into a ghost town inhabited only by an old prospector and his comely tomboy granddaughter (James Barton & Anne Baxter). Life-or-death conflicts ensue.

Yellow Sky (1948) is a top-of-the-line classic B&W Western that borrows the basic premise of Shakespeares The Tempest and influenced future Westerns, like The Law and Jake Wade (1958) and Day of the Outlaw (1959), not to mention the sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet (1956). Theres even a remake set during the gold rush of South Africa with Vincent Price called The Jackals (1967...

Gregory Peck ("Stretch") leads a miscreant gang of bank robbers, who are chased by a troop of army cavalry into a deserted gold mining town that's occupied only by a young (and pretty) Anne Baxter ("Mike") and her grandfather James Barton. Desperately thirsty after their trudge across the salt flats, the men are soon suitably revivified - body and soul - and set their sights on this young lady, and on their gold. After quite a few, entertaining, scraps "Stretch" and the feisty woman gradually start to bond, and they make a deal to split their golden horde - worth some $50,000 - 50/50 . The only thing is, they have to dig it out of their collapsed mine. "Dude" (Richard Widmark) is less convinced by this plan, and as their digging continues, ...