The Tempest V. Yellow Sky: Shakespeare Meets The Wild West
William A. Wellman’s classic film, Yellow Sky (1948), re-imagines Shakespeare’s masterpiece, The Tempest, in the brutal and fantastic American Wild West. The film is told through a gang of bank robbing outlaws that find themselves deserted in a desolate ghost town named Yellow Sky.
Plot
James “Stretch” Dawson is the leader of a rough and violent gang of outlaws. After the gang’s notorious bank robbery in 1867, they flee out into the desert where they find themselves without water. The gang comes across an old abandoned ghost town with two precocious residents, an old man (Grandpa) and his granddaughter (Mike). Mike is an aggressive and hardworking young woman that Stretch becomes attracted to. Many of the other men take an interest in Mike and attempts to rape her in a later scene. The youngest member of the gang, Bull Run, comes to Mike’s aid and unsuccessfully tries to fight Lengthy until Stretch shows up and almost drowns Lengthy.
The more pragmatist of the gang, Dude, has scoped out the ghost town and discovered that Grandpa is mining for a huge sum of gold. Dude involves the other gang members in this information. Unsatisfied with their 6-way split earnings in bank robberies, the gang develops a plot to steal the gold. Stretch is uninterested in tampering with Grandpa’s prospects and a fight ensues between Dude and Stretch over who should be the gang leader.
Later Stretch gives his loyalty to Grandpa and Mike. Grandpa attempts to bargain with the men and says that he would be willing to split the gold sum amongst them.
The next day a band of Apache Indians come into town while the men are mining gold. Grandpa convinces the Apache to return to their lands. Stretch gives gratitude top grandpa for not persuading the Apache to kill his gang and tells his gang that they will split the gold profit. Furious at this proposition, Dude pulls a gun on Stretch and a gunfight between all of the men ensues throughout the ghost town. Stretch becomes wounded and Lengthy attempts to run away with the gold, but Dude and Stretch chase after him. The three are caught in a shoot out to the death in the old saloon. Mike later finds that Dude and Lengthy are dead and Stretch is severely wounded. Stretch and the rest of the gang decide to give back the bank money that they stole and split the gold with Grandpa and Mike.
Cast
Yellow Sky The Tempest
- Gregory Peck as James "Stretch" Dawson Ferdinand/Ariel
- Anne Baxter as "Mike" (Constance Mae) Miranda
- Richard Widmark as Dude Stephano
- Robert Arthur as Bull Run Shipwreck Survivor
- John Russell as Lengthy Caliban
- Harry Morgan as Half Pint Shipwreck Survivor
- James Barton as Grandpa Prospero
- Charles Kemper as Walrus Shipwreck Survivor
Elements of The Tempest
Although Yellow Sky is an extremely loose adaptation of The Tempest, many of the same elements and themes are present in both works. For example, The Tempest has an element of comparing men to monsters. Throughout Yellow Sky there are many allusions to that theme. Mike, similar to Miranda, experiences both the brutish monster of aggression within men, as well as the human conscience that they possess and is thus driven to find solace with the love of a good man. In the Tempest, Caliban is seen as the monster among men that fails to be accepted amongst the humans of the Island. In Yellow Sky, the character Lengthy possesses the same rejection from the humanity of the group that Caliban is imprisoned by.
Another popular theme that is present in both works is the idea of justice being fulfilled. Throughout the film, Stretch’s men, as crooked as their profession may be, are held to a pecking order of justice within the group. When one of them does wrong by another, Stretch is often the father figure that steps in with punishment and a keen sense of what is right. Although the story of Yellow Sky is told through the eyes of a protagonist that is more similar to Ariel and Ferdinand, we see this same sense of justice within Prospero inThe Tempest.
Classification
As classified by Julie Sanders:
Adaptation: "Reinterpretations of established texts in new generic contexts or with relocations of an 'original' or source text’s cultural and/or temporal setting, which may or may not involve a generic shift."
Transpositions: A type of adaptation where a text from one genre is delivered to new audiences by means of aesthetic conventions of an entirely different generic process or further, through cultural, geographical, and temporal terms.
Analogue: A type of adaptation, a stand-alone work that is deepened by the understanding of the source text.
Yellow Sky is a vivid transposition of The Tempest into the western genre that can be view as a stand-alone work. Yellow Sky deepens the understanding of the themes in The Tempest as well as reinterprets its meaning.
Adaptations of Yellow Sky
Stretch Dawson (1950)- A novel by William A. Wellman
Yellow Sky (1949)- A Radio Adaptation by William A. Wellman
The Jackals (1967)- A South African Adaptation by Robert D. Webb
Reception From Audiences
Many critics were skeptical at first of William A. Wellman’s vision. Many critics worried that setting The Tempest in the American West and ultimately changing the protagonist of the storyline would disrespect the original work. Despite these fears, when the film was received by audiences as one of biggest block busters of the year and as a film that could stand alone as well as beside The Tempest. To this day, William A. Wellman’s Yellow Sky is revered as a classic western as well as a beloved Shakespeare adaptation.
References
Gallagher, Cullen (November 30, 2010). "'Stretch Dawson' by W.R. Burnett
(Gold Medal, 1950)". Pulp Serenade. Retrieved 2014-11-10.
Howard, Tony (2007). "Shakespeare's cinematic offshoots". In Jackson, Russell. The
Cambridge companion to Shakespeare on film. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 303–23. ISBN 978-0-521-68501-6.
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