Movie Review: Gregory Peck, Anne Baxter, and Richard Widmark in Yellow Sky (1948)

Spanish language poster for Yellow Sky, or Cielo Amarillo, 1948. The poster artist even got Richard Widmark's smirk right.

Gregory Peck in Yellow Sky, 1948. Still handsome, even with a scruffy beard.

Anne Baxter and Gregory Peck in Yellow Sky, 1948. He shaved his beard to impress her. He's really hoping she doesn't punch him in the face again.

Richard Widmark practicing his smirk. He's flanked by Harry Morgan on the left and Robert Arthur on the right.

Yellow Sky, released in 1948, is a fascinating and unusual western. Directed by William A. Wellman, Yellow Sky stars Gregory Peck, Anne Baxter, and Richard Widmark. Wellman directed many well-known movies, including the very first Oscar winner for Best Picture, Wings. Among Wellman’s other famous movies are The Public Enemy, with James Cagney, the original 1937 version of A Star is Born, the 1939 remake of Beau Geste, with Gary Cooper, Ray Milland, and a very young Robert Preston, and The High and the Mighty, with John Wayne. 

Peck stars as “Stretch,” the leader of a gang of outlaws. His gang includes Richard Widmark, John Russell, and a very young Harry Morgan. After robbing a bank, the gang crosses a large salt flat. Desperate for water, they come across an abandoned town whose only inhabitants are a young woman called Mike, (Anne Baxter) and her grandfather, played by James Barton. Mike is hostile to the gang and just wants them to leave. But members of the gang think that she and her grandfather are hiding a cache of gold. 

I’ll leave the plot summary there, so as not to reveal all of the twists and turns the movie takes. I had never heard of Yellow Sky until recently, when it came up as I was searching my DVR for movies starring Gregory Peck. I read the plot summary, which reads something like, “A gang of outlaws come upon a ghost town and its only inhabitant.” I said to myself, “That sounds so weird, I need to see this movie.” I’m very glad I did, as Yellow Sky is an excellent film. The cinematography is great, and there are a lot of very well-composed shots. Many of the camera angles and shadows make it feel a lot like a film noir. There’s even a moment when we see a POV shot through the barrel of Mike’s rifle, which looks just like the famous opening sequence from the James Bond movies, 14 years before there were any Bond movies. One of the coolest parts of Yellow Sky is that we don’t even get to see the climactic shoot-out. We just see the flashes of gunfire and have to wait until Mike runs in to see who, if anyone, is left standing.

The cast is superb, and the characters are well-drawn, as all of the members of the gang have distinct personalities. John Russell is very good as “Lengthy,” and he has an interesting moment at the beginning of the film as he stares at a drawing of a busty woman on a horse. You can tell from the snide comment he makes and his intense glare that he only thinks of women as objects, which becomes more clear when we see his interactions with Mike. With his long hair and mustache, Russell would have no trouble fitting in as a 2014 hipster. Anne Baxter, perhaps best known for playing Eve in All About Eve, is very well cast as the tough girl Mike. (Her real name is Constance Mae.) Although Baxter was slight in stature, she carries herself with the confidence and steely courage the character requires. She even decks Peck when he gets fresh with her. I haven’t seen Anne Baxter is very many movies, but she was stunningly beautiful in Yellow Sky. A really cool fact that I learned about Anne Baxter is that her grandfather was Frank Lloyd Wright. I wonder if she got a family discount on Wright-designed houses? I also learned that I’ve seen Anne Baxter’s grave, without knowing it. She’s buried in the small churchyard across the highway from Wright’s home and studio Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Richard Widmark had made his movie debut just the year before in Kiss of Death, in which he played a maniacal bad guy, for which he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Yellow Sky was just his fourth movie, and although he was getting typecast, it shows how good Widmark was at playing a jerk. His smirky grin lets you know that his character “Dude” is not to be trusted. Yellow Sky was a rare turn as a bad guy for Gregory Peck, although it quickly becomes clear that even though his character Stretch is an outlaw, there are other members of his gang who are worse people. (Like Dude.) Peck plays his part well as the confident leader of the gang. Which makes me wonder, did Gregory Peck ever play a self-doubting character? Greg Peck always knows what to do. He wouldn’t have made a very good Hamlet. Also, let me just say for the record, holy shit Gregory Peck was handsome. I mean, there’s handsome and then there’s Gregory Peck handsome, which is like the ne plus ultra of handsome. Richard Widmark looks like he could be someone you might know in real life. He looks like a normal guy. But you don’t know anyone in real life who looks like Gregory Peck. Gregory Peck looks like a movie star. 

If you’re looking for a western with interesting, well-drawn characters, go see Yellow Sky.

Leading Men 2: Further Thoughts on Kirk Douglas, William Holden, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, and Gregory Peck

Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, 1957.

Kirk and Burt in Tough Guys, their final film together, 1986.

Kirk Douglas consoles Robert Mitchum about the missing end of his tie in 1947's Out Of the Past.

Three big stars, one lousy movie. Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, and Richard Widmark in The Way West, 1967.

Robert Mitchum sings to Loretta Young as William Holden sulks in the background. Rachel and the Stranger, 1948. Having Robert Mitchum play a charming stranger must have seemed like typecasting even then.

Robert Mitchum shows off his physique as Gregory Peck looks unimpressed in 1962's Cape Fear.

Earlier this year, I wrote an essay about five of my favorite actors from the 1940’s and 1950’s, Kirk Douglas, William Holden, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, and Gregory Peck. As I said in my previous essay, I’ve always grouped these five actors together, as they were all of the same generation and were some of the most successful actors of that generation. In this sequel to that essay, I’ll discuss the movies those five actors made with each other. 

Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster are the two actors of the five who are most closely linked, as they starred in five movies together, I Walk Alone, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, The Devil’s Disciple, Seven Days in May, and Tough Guys. They also both appeared in Victory at Entebbe, a made for TV movie in which they don’t have any scenes together, and they also both had cameo parts in The List of Adrian Messenger, but didn’t appear together. Douglas and Lancaster had lots of chemistry together on screen, and they obviously enjoyed working together. I’ve previously reviewed The Devil’s Disciple, Seven Days in May, and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral on this blog. I would recommend Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and Seven Days in May as their best films together. If you want to see Burt and Kirk as buddies, watch Gunfight. If you want to see them as rivals, watch Seven Days in May. I Walk Alone isn’t a very successful movie. It’s a film noir that captures both actors very early on in their careers. Lancaster plays an ex-con, who is suspicious of everyone, including his former partner in crime Douglas. Lancaster overreacts to everything that happens. If Douglas offers him a cup of coffee, Lancaster’s character is liable to jump up and say, “What’s the big idea? You think I like coffee? I don’t!” It gets annoying to watch. Douglas is excellent as a slimy gangster/nightclub owner. Tough Guys was written especially for Kirk and Burt, and the script is a knowing parody of their screen personas. It’s a little bit silly, as it was made in 1986, and it tries a little too hard to show that these old guys are still tough. But it’s nice that they got to make one final picture with each other as a capstone to their careers together. 

While Douglas and Lancaster may not have been best friends in real life, they had a respect for each other that lasted even longer than the nearly 40 years in between their first movie and their last. Douglas said of his relationship with Lancaster, “Some people think we’re the closest buddies. We’re not, though I think we have a wonderful friendship. Sometimes I don’t see Burt for a year or two, but he’s there if I need him and I’m here if he needs me. We have a respect for each other that we don’t voice.” (Against Type: The Biography of Burt Lancaster, by Gary Fishgall, p.368) At a tribute to Douglas in 1987, Lancaster teased his friend, saying, “Kirk would be the first person to tell you he’s a difficult man. And I would be the second.” (The Ragman’s Son, by Kirk Douglas, p.247) 

Both Douglas and Lancaster came from backgrounds of extreme poverty, Lancaster growing up in East Harlem, and Douglas in upstate New York. They both made their film debuts in 1946, and became some of the first actors to start their own independent film production companies. Both men had a reputation for voicing their strong opinions on film sets, and I have no doubt that there were some heated discussions on the five film sets they shared.

Tony Curtis acted in highly successful films opposite both men, as he made The Vikings and Spartacus with Kirk Douglas, and Trapeze and Sweet Smell of Success with Burt Lancaster. Curtis had this to say about the difference in their personalities: “On the floor, in the work, Kirk was a killer, much more than Burt. He would take no prisoners. If it {the camera shot} was over Kirk’s shoulder on me, by the time the shot was over, it was over my shoulder on Kirk.” (Burt Lancaster: An American Life, by Kate Buford, p.165) 

Kirk Douglas made two movies twenty years apart with Robert Mitchum. Their first movie together was the excellent film noir Out of the Past, from 1947. In his autobiography, Douglas wrote about Mitchum, “I don’t remember much about him, except that his stories about being a hobo kept changing every time he told them.” (Douglas, p.123) Both young actors were eager to upstage the other. During one scene, Douglas flipped a coin as he talked. Mitchum’s eyes focused on the coin, just as the audience would. Douglas then had to find some other way to steal attention from Mitchum. Both Mitchum and Douglas gave great performances in Out Of the Past. Their second movie together, The Way West, from 1967, was a turgid story about the Oregon Trail. It was adapted from a novel by A.B. Guthrie, Jr., which had won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1950. On the screen, it’s a dull attempt at an epic, despite also starring another big male star from the post-war era, Richard Widmark. The movie also features Sally Field in one of her first roles. The Way West draws on the differences in screen personas between the sleepy and relaxed Mitchum and the tense and electric Douglas. Mitchum appears to literally sleepwalk through his part, while Douglas chews all the scenery he can. 

Robert Mitchum starred in movies with Douglas, Peck, and Holden. Mitchum’s one movie with William Holden, Rachel and the Stranger, was a Western made in 1948, as Mitchum was enjoying his first flush of fame and Holden was trying to recapture the forward momentum of his career. 1948 was also the year that Mitchum was busted for marijuana possession, and eventually he served a little more than a month in jail. The unperturbed Mitchum quipped that jail was “Like Palm Springs, but without the riff-raff.” Mitchum had the better part in Rachel and the Stranger, as he plays a friend of Holden’s who stays with him and his wife, played by Loretta Young. Mitchum gets to be mysterious and flirty, two things he did very well, while Holden gets to be boring and upstanding. Loretta Young thought that Holden was nervous at competing with Mitchum, and he probably was. At the time, Mitchum’s career was doing very well, while Holden’s was in the same holding pattern he had been stuck in for years. It no doubt irked Holden to be working with a more successful young male actor. But the funniest story from the making of Rachel and the Stranger is about Loretta Young’s on-set habits. Young was a notorious prude, very religious and very upstanding, even though she had secretly had an out of wedlock daughter with Clark Gable in the 1930’s. (Young’s cover story was that she had “adopted” the girl.) Young had a “swear jar” on the set of all of her movies. Every time someone on the crew swore, they would put in a nickel for “hell,” a dime for “damn,” and so on. This drove Robert Mitchum nuts, and one day, feeling extremely frustrated, he put a large bill in the jar and let forth with a torrent of profanity. I can only imagine the look on Loretta Young’s face. 

Mitchum’s film with Gregory Peck, Cape Fear, from 1962, offered Mitchum a fantastic part as the criminal who blames lawyer Peck for his going to jail. When Mitchum gets out of jail, he systematically taunts and harasses Peck’s family. It’s one of Mitchum’s best roles, and he oozes menace. Mitchum’s sexy but intimidating physical presence was used very well. Peck is also superb in his role, as he finds himself having to stoop to Mitchum’s level to stop the threat to his family. Peck and Mitchum got along well during filming, even though during the climactic fight scene Peck accidentally hit Mitchum in the jaw. Mitchum said he was sore for three days afterwards. Peck and Mitchum also appeared in cameo roles in Martin Scorsese’s vastly inferior 1991 remake of Cape Fear, which replaces the unseen malevolence of the original with over the top ultraviolence. 

Unfortunately, Burt Lancaster and William Holden never worked together in a movie. I think it would have been great fun to see these two superbly athletic actors in the same film. But they did think highly of each other. They were both nominated for the Best Actor Oscar in 1953, Lancaster for From Here to Eternity, and Holden for Stalag 17. Holden won the Oscar. Holden said to journalist Bob Thomas, “I really thought Burt would win…I honestly believed that Burt did the best acting of the year, and I told him so when I saw him.” (Golden Boy: The Untold Story of William Holden, by Bob Thomas, p.94) Lancaster sent Holden a telegram after Holden won that read: “Never had a doubt about the outcome for a moment.” (Fishgall, p.125)

Deborah Kerr starred in films with all five actors. I don’t know if she’s the only actor or actress to appear with all five, but she’s certainly the most famous. She must have gotten along well with some of them, as she worked with Lancaster three times, and starred opposite Mitchum four times.

Here’s my “best of” list for these five actors:

Aged the best: Gregory Peck. His hair turned gray, but that's about the only way he aged.

Aged the worst: Robert Mitchum. Mitchum actually aged really well until about 60 or 65, but then all of a sudden he just looked super old.

Best album: Robert Mitchum, “Calypso Is Like So,” 1957. It’s just as amazing as you would think a Robert Mitchum calypso album would be.  

Runner-up: “William Holden Presents a Musical Touch of Far Away Places,” 1959. Holden doesn’t sing or play any instruments; he just “presented” the music and wrote the liner notes.

Best single: Robert Mitchum, “The Ballad of Thunder Road,” 1958. Mitchum starred in, produced, and co-wrote the screenplay for the classic 1958 movie Thunder Road. He also co-wrote the theme song for it, which he sings in his wonderful deep voice.

Most intense: Kirk Douglas

Most laid-back: Robert Mitchum

Best hair: Burt Lancaster, in The Crimson Pirate.

Best chin: Kirk Douglas. I’ve read somewhere that early in his career a studio wanted Douglas to have his signature dimpled chin filled in. It’s probably the same studio who complained about Gregory Peck’s ears being different sizes. 

Most literate: Kirk Douglas, who has written several autobiographies and novels. He’s the only one of the 5 actors to write a book.

Most underappreciated: Robert Mitchum, with a total of 0 Best Actor Oscar nominations. (He was nominated once for Best Supporting Actor for The Story of G.I. Joe in 1945.)

Most traveled: William Holden, who supposedly accepted some movies just to travel to new countries. That’s really the only reasonable explanation for him making The World of Suzie Wong. Entranced by Africa, Holden started a wildlife preserve in Kenya.

Least Picky: Robert Mitchum, whose IMDB filmography lists 135 credits. Even not counting his bit appearances early in his career, he made the most movies by far.

Most Picky: Gregory Peck, who has “only” 58 credits on IMDB. In looking at Peck’s filmography I was really surprised at how few movies he made after 1970. For the record, Holden has 77 credits, Lancaster 89, and Douglas has 92.

Favorite Kirk Douglas performance: As Vincent Van Gogh in Lust For Life.

Favorite William Holden performance: Tie between Sunset Boulevard and Picnic.

Favorite Burt Lancaster performance: Elmer Gantry.

Favorite Robert Mitchum performance: As the charming/creepy preacher in The Night of the Hunter.

Favorite Gregory Peck performance: It’s obvious, but he was perfect in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Movie Review: Stanley Kramer's On the Beach, starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, and Anthony Perkins (1959)

Gregory Peck, looking dashing in uniform as Dwight Towers in On the Beach, 1959.

Anthony Perkins, Gregory Peck, and nuclear scientist Fred Astaire.

The Coca-Cola bottle sending the Morse code signals in On the Beach.

A lighter moment on the set with Fred Astaire, Ava Gardner, Gregory Peck, and producer/director Stanley Kramer.

Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner, 1959.

Stanley Kramer’s 1959 film On the Beach was one of the first Hollywood movies to take a serious look at the dangers of nuclear warfare. Based on the 1957 novel by Nevil Shute, On the Beach takes place in the then-future of 1964, after a nuclear war has destroyed nearly all of the life on the planet. Radioactive fallout is slowly spreading south, and On the Beach follows a group of people in Australia, which is the only place in the world that is still inhabited by humans. 

Gregory Peck plays Dwight Towers, the captain of the Sawfish, an American nuclear submarine. The Sawfish survived the war and heads to Australia. Towers’ liaison with the Australian Navy is Peter Holmes, played by Anthony Perkins. Holmes has a wife and baby, and he struggles with the realization that they will all soon die. His wife is in denial about their situation, and doesn’t want to discuss it. Holmes introduces Towers to several of his friends, including the alcoholic Moira Davidson (Ava Gardner) and the alcoholic scientist Julian Osborn (Fred Astaire). Towers has a wife and two children in the United States, and although he knows it is highly likely that they are dead, he still talks about them in the present tense. Towers and Moria start spending more time together, and eventually their relationship becomes romantic. 

Meanwhile, naval communications in Australia are picking up Morse code signals from San Diego. The signals are gibberish, but on the possibility that it could be a survivor, they dispatch the Sawfish to check it out. But on their way to San Diego, the Sawfish heads as far north as possible to see if radioactive levels have dropped. Julian Osborn goes along on the trip as the head scientist, and he confirms that radioactive levels are still very high. I was surprised at how little of the movie took place on the submarine. I thought most of the movie would be focused on their journey northward and then to San Diego, but they get to Alaska in about two minutes. The Sawfish stops by San Francisco on their way to San Diego, and one of the most moving moments in the film is the montage of crew members looking through the periscope at a totally uninhabited city. One crewman from the Sawfish, Ralph Swain, is from San Francisco, and he leaves the submarine to return to his home. An oddly moving moment is the conversation that Towers and Swain have the next morning as the Sawfish prepares to depart. Towers is speaking over the loudspeaker of the submarine, so all we see is Swain sitting on shore talking to a submarine periscope. It’s funny and sad at the same time, a moment that seems so surreal, yet the emotion is heightened as we know that Swain’s conversation with Towers will be the last contact he has with another human being before he dies from fallout. 

The Sawfish tracks the Morse code signal to a refinery in San Diego. One of the crew is sent ashore to investigate and find the signal. He finds that the signal is coming from a Coca-Cola bottle that has fallen and gotten stuck in a window shade. As the breeze moves the window shade, the bottle strikes the telegraph keys, sending the nonsense gibberish messages. The last hope for any survivors has been dashed. 

The submarine returns to Australia and the men wait out their inevitable fate. Osborn has always had a passion for cars, so he enters a car race and wins. It’s the most suicidal car race ever seen on film, as drivers deliberately crash their cars to avoid a painful death from nuclear fallout. The government is handing out suicide pills, and Holmes and his wife finally have a realistic conversation about how they will euthanize their baby before killing themselves. Osborn commits suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning, sitting at the wheel of the race car he loved. Towers and Moira know that they have little time left. The remaining crew of the Sawfish vote to head back to the United States, even though they know they will die before they make it home. Towers commands the ship on its final voyage, and Moira watches from a hill as Towers and the Sawfish depart. 

On the Beach is a bleak film. There is no glimmer of hope for mankind, no way out of the terrible situation the characters find themselves in. One of the questions the movie asks is: how would you spend your last days on earth? Personally, I would rather be in the arms of Ava Gardner than on a doomed submarine. But that’s just me.

All of the performances in On the Beach are excellent. Gregory Peck is perfectly cast as the stoic Dwight Towers, who never panics in the face of a terrible future. If I were on a submarine as the world was ending, there’s really no one I’d rather have be in charge than Gregory Peck. Ava Gardner is very well cast as the alcoholic Moira, who sees in Peck a final chance at some happy moments. While it might seem unbelievable that Dwight and Moira would embark on a romantic relationship, the fact that they are played by the superbly handsome Greg Peck and the delectable Ava Gardner makes it seem obvious why they would like each other. On the Beach was Peck and Gardner’s third and final movie together. They also co-starred in The Great Sinner in 1949 and The Snows of Kilimanjaro in 1952. Peck and Gardner have an obvious chemistry in their scenes together. 

Anthony Perkins is touching as the officer with a wife and a young baby. A baby is always a symbol of hope for the future, but in On the Beach we know that there will be no future for this baby. Perkins brings his all-American boy next door charm to the role, and he’s very convincing in the part. A year after On the Beach, Perkins would star as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which forever changed his on screen image. Hitchcock saw that Perkins’s off-kilter charm just needed a slight twist to seem super creepy. Although Psycho was a highlight of Anthony Perkins’s movie career, it also typecast him as a bad guy.

On the Beach is a rare non-musical film role for Fred Astaire. He does a good job as the morose scientist, even though his toupee is distractingly awful. Astaire looks so much older in On the Beach than he did in Silk Stockings and Funny Face, both released just two years before On the Beach. The character that Astaire plays was written as a much younger man in his 20’s in the novel. That makes a little more sense given his love of race cars. But Astaire brings touching moments to the part. When Perkins is worried about his wife and baby, Astaire says “At least you have someone to worry about.” 

One thing I didn’t understand about the movie is what nationality is everyone supposed to be? Peck is obviously an American, but what about the characters that Perkins, Astaire, and Gardner play? Are they all supposed to be Australians? Thankfully no one attempts an accent, although Astaire does pronounce some words very strangely, as though he suddenly remembered his character wasn’t American. 

Stanley Kramer does a good job of directing On the Beach, and I liked his use of titled camera angles to emphasize the surreal circumstances the characters find themselves in. There’s ambiguity in On the Beach, as we never learn how the nuclear war started, or which side dropped the first bomb. Ultimately, that’s irrelevant to the story, which was Kramer’s point-every side loses in a nuclear war. Kramer was most famous for serious films that dealt with important topics of the day. His credits as a producer include Death of a Salesman, High Noon, The Wild One, and The Caine Mutiny. As a director, his most famous films are The Defiant Ones, Inherit the Wind, Judgment at Nuremberg, Ship of Fools, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. The least successful aspect of On the Beach was the ridiculously repetitive score by Ernest Gold, which will make you really sick of “Waltzing Matilda” by the time you get half an hour into the movie. Oddly enough, Gold won a Golden Globe for his score for On the Beach, and the score was also nominated for an Oscar. Gold would win the Oscar the following year for his score for Exodus. Trivia note: Gold was married to Marni Nixon, who famously dubbed many female stars’ singing voices, including Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, and Natalie Wood in West Side Story.

On the Beach is an excellent movie from an era in which the threat of nuclear destruction was at its highest, and I strongly recommend it.