The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky

After writing for sixteen years for Fortune, Time and The Nation, James Agee, whose first love had been movies, wrote the narration and dialogue for the nonfiction film The Quiet One (1948). Having published a long, flattering essay for Life about John Huston, he was invited by Huston in 1950 to join him in California to work on film scripts. Agee adapted the Stephen Crane story "The Blue Hotel," which Huston liked, but chose not to accept (the script was later published and can also be found here). It was while he was with Huston that Agee suffered his first heart attack. Agee drank heavily, and so did Huston. But Huston liked living a hard physical life as well, and he may have pushed Agee too hard. Once Agee had recovered, Huston persuaded him to write the script for The African Queen (based on the book by C. S. Forester). Prior commitments prevented him from working with Huston to adapt Moby Dick a few years later. One of those commitments was The Night of the Hunter (1955).

In 1952, Huntington Hartford, heir to the A&P fortune (1) and patron of the arts, produced the "anthology film" Face to Face, based on a rather odd pairing of stories by Joseph Conrad ("The Secret Sharer") and Stephen Crane. Crane's "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" is a charming story about Jack Potter, a small town marshall who impulsively marries a young lady in San Antonio and, abashed at not telling the townsfolk about her and wanting to avoid embarrassment, he tries to sneak her back to town. Unfortunately, at the very moment he arrives with his bride by train, the town drunk, Scratchy Wilson, has gone on a rampage and is looking for the Marshall, who alone has had the ability to disarm him.

Agee wrote the script for the film, directed by Bretaigne Windust. It takes up only about a third of Face to Face, which is all the time it needed. Robert Preston plays Jack Potter. Never known for his subtlety, he is perfect playing the assured, resolute town Marshall, whose tenderness toward his bride is conveyed in small looks and gestures.(2) Marjorie Steele plays the bride, and she is probably the reason the film was made, since she was Huntington Hartford's second wife at the time. He helped her movie career along as long as he could until he gave up in 1960 and divorced her. But she is excellent as Jack Potter's bride - a role that is otherwise nebulous in Crane's story. She contributes to the mystery of just exactly how and why the two of them got married in San Antonio. Scratchy Wilson is played by Minor Watson, who had a long and prolific career that started at the Essanay Studio in 1916. Some clever camera work introduces us to him drinking a bottle of whisky and cleaning his pistols, preparing to "settle" things once and for all with Jack Potter. Agee himself appears in a small role (Dwight Macdonald called the role "the town drunk") in the Yellow Sky saloon.

Agee's script invents a few funny details not in the slight story, such as Scratchy actually scratching himself in his first scene (how else did he get the name?), shooting the preacher's doorbell so that it gets stuck ringing, and, at the film's conclusion, walking away from his confrontation with Potter, Scratchy looks at his pistols (while everyone watching holds their breath) and, instead of holstering them, he merely drops them on the ground.

Dwight MacDonald called the film "a delightful short comedy". It's delightful for its giddiness - it is Fred Zinneman's self-reverent High Noon spun around on its axis - Jack Potter, marshall in Yellow Sky, doesn't know that his nemesis awaits him there and that he is planning to shoot him just as soon as he appears. But, unlike Gary Cooper in High Noon, who goes around town, accompanied by that prodding song, "Do not forsake me, o my darlin'," searching for reinforcements, Potter confronts Scratchy unarmed. And instead of Grace Kelly lighting out on a wagon when zero hour draws nigh, Potter's bride is standing right beside her husband when he meets Scratchy.

The production certainly has a backlot look to it, with housefronts instead of real houses, and all the paraphernalia of a Western town without the usual rough justice and the moral rectitude of it. In its gentleness, the film is exactly what Stephen Crane would maybe have intended it to be: a send-up of all the dime novel Westerns so popular from 1860 onwards, that promoted a purely fictionalized image of the American West for the consumption of Easterners in cities starved for excitement. Crane would examine the effects of this fictional image more seriously in his longer story, "The Blue Hotel," set in a Nebraska town on the verge of the West, as close as a "Swede," his imagination filled with dime novel delusions, would ever get to the genuine article - even if the genuine article had disappeared completely by the 1890s, when Crane wrote the story. James Agee's script for "The Blue Hotel" is so rich in details of blocking and camera placement, it's a wonder it remains "unproduced."(3)

James Agee had done so much writing-to-order for so long, sometimes unsigned, that when he finally had the time to write as he pleased, he almost didn't know where to begin. His work on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men went largely unheralded (the necessarily oversized book, to do justice to Walker Evans's great photographs, was finally published by Houghton Mifflin), and his only novel, A Death in the Family, was left unfinished. That leaves us an early volume of poetry, his voluminous film writings and his film scripts. The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, now all but forgotten, is a beautiful short film, deserving of preservation and restoration, quite separable from The Secret Sharer, that occupies the rest of Face to Face.

Dwight Macdonald wrote a moving tribute to Agee when A Death in the Family was published. His long essay includes the following paragraph:

"James Agee died in 1955 at the age of forty-five. He died of a heart attack in a taxicab, and the platitudes about 'shock' and 'loss' suddenly became real. A friend I had for thirty years respected intellectually and sympathized with emotionally and disapproved of temperamentally and been stimulated by conversationally had vanished, abruptly and for good. I had always thought of Agee as the most broadly gifted writer of my generation, the one who, if anyone, might someday do major work. He didn’t do it, or not much of it, but I am not the only one who expected he would. He really shouldn’t have died, I kept thinking, and now this posthumous book makes me think it all the harder."


(1) A&P, the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, was the largest grocer chain in America in the 1950s.
(2) Preston played the father who is killed in a car accident in the 1963 film adaptation of Tad Model's play All the Way Home, which was a stage adaptation of James Agee's novel A Death in the Family.
(3) The story was adapted in 1974 to a television film by Harry Mark Petrakis and directed by Czech filmmaker Jan Kadar. Except for the vivid performance by David Warner as the Swede, its alterations of Crane's story were unnecessary and the film is now in limbo where it belongs.