_**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 Shakespeare’s “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). There’s even a remake set during the gold rush of South Africa with Vincent Price called “The Jackals” (1967).

If you remove the opening and closing score, which is understandably passé, this holds up in the modern day as a psychological adult Western that’s film noir-ish. While some people favor B&W, I don’t (although I can roll with it), and would love to see a colorized version.

Anne Baxter was only 24 during filming.

The film runs 1 hour, 38 minutes, and was shot at Owens Lake, Death Valley National Monument, and Alabama Hills, just west of Lone Pine, California.

GRADE: A-