I love Gregory Peck. I wish he could be president, like Opus intended. But he’s dead, and dead people can’t be president. It’s too bad, because I always wanted a president who looked kinda like Ichiro!. Have you ever noticed the slight resemblance between Gregory Peck and Ichiro!? Not so much older Gregory Peck, but young Gregory Peck, especially when he has a little facial hair. Looks just like Ichiro!, from a certain angle. Don’t believe me? Then watch Yellow Sky, you’ll see the resemblance. And you’ll also see a pretty good, if somewhat conventional, western.
Calling Yellow Sky conventional is not meant as an insult. All westerns are conventional and ll westerns inherently revolve around the conflict between order and chaos, and Yellow Sky is no exception. But its strict adherence to the conventions of the genre should not be held against Yellow Sky. There is a certain pleasure in the genre film. As Judith Hess Wright writes:
Genre films produce satisfaction rather than action, pity and fear rather than revolt. They serve the interests of the ruling class by assisting in the maintenance of the status quo, and they throw a sop to oppressed groups who, because they are unorganized and therefore afraid to act, eagerly accept the genre film’s absurd solutions to economic and social conflicts. When we return to the complexities of the society in which we live, the same conflicts assert themselves, so we return to genre films for easy comfort and solace–hence their popularity.
I couldn’t have said it better myself. I often find myself facing many of the same complex situations faced by the characters in westerns. Why, just the other day, I was being chased by lawmen across the salt flats of Death Valley, but instead of stopping to assess my situation and find out just why the hell these lawmen were chasing me across the alkali flats, I chickened out and watched Yellow Sky instead. I would much rather see Gregory Peck resolve problems with lawmen than face the lawmen-related problems in my own life. That’s why I love Gregory Peck. Not only does he sorta look like Ichiro!, he tidily resolves problems in ways I could never imagine.
But what Hess Wright and other genre theorist fail to mention is the hidden motif that lurks deep within many western. People will compose essay after essay about Good vs. Evil, Man vs. Nature, Civilisation vs. Savages and other supposedly archetypal elements of the western, but no one ever talks about the Tap That Ass motif. Classic westerns all revolve around the Tap That Ass motif. Either someone is trying to tap that ass (Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine) or trying to prevent an certain ass from being tapped (The Searchers). Yellow Sky features a little of both.
In Yellow Sky, Gregory Peck and his group of bank robbers are chased across the salt flats and stumble, near-death, into a ghost town inhabited by Anne Baxter and her grandfather. Peck and the outlaws stay to rest and soon find out that Anne Baxter and her grandfather are sitting on $50,000 worth of gold. One might think that Yellow Sky would then be about the conflict of Good vs. Evil, with Gregory Peck and his men trying to rob innocent Anne Baxter of her hard-earned fortune. But that’s only a small part of it. The bulk of Yellow Sky is devoted to the issue of who will tap that ass first.
There are six member of Gregory Peck’s band of outlaws, and three of them want to Tap That Ass. Of the other three, one is a drunk, the other is crazy and the third, Richard Widmark, likes to keep himself well-groomed and dress in white shirts and is called “Dude”, which in western code probably means he is a homersexual. So those three aren’t even in the running to tap that ass. What it basically comes down to is Gregory Peck having to kick some ass to stop the others from tapping that ass, not because it’s the right thing to do, but because he wants to tap that ass himself. Naturally, this drives a rift between Peck and his men, a rift comes to end in a Shakespearean in magnitude fashion.
Yellow Sky is a western, so naturally it ends in a shoot-out. Gregory Peck and Anne Baxter fight off Richard Widmark and the others, thus earning Gregory Peck the right to finally tap that ass. But first, there must be what Judith Hess Wright calls the “absurd solutions”, but what everyone else call happy endings. Gregory Peck returns the money he stole from the bank and buys Anne Baxter a hat. Gregory Peck is a man of many talents, but one thing he will not do is tap an ass that is dressed like a man.
As you might have gathered, Yellow Sky is a film with an odd morality. Gregory Peck is a criminal, his men fear to cross him because they know he’ll hunt them down and kill them and he even tries to rape Anne Baxter. But not really. He was only just pretending to rape Anne Baxter, to show her that he could hurt her if he wanted to. But he doesn’t want to hurt her, because he’s Gregory Peck and Gregory Peck is a classy dude. Yellow Sky wants to have it both ways, presenting Gregory Peck as both an upstanding, honest, Henry Fonda type and as the violent, ruthless, Henry Fonda type. It’s bothersome, and it prevents Yellow Sky from being anything better than merely a really good western.
In Yellow Sky, we see the influence of noir morality and casting seeping into the conventions of the western. But that’s all it is, a seeping. This isn’t an Anthony Mann western, but it tries to be at times. You should still check it out. On my scale of one to five tiny heads of Sergei Eisenstein, I give Yellow Sky four tiny heads of Sergei Eisenstein.
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