The Jackals

Veteran Hollywood hand Robert D. Webb concluded his career as director of this remake of 'Yellow Sky' that transposed the action to South Africa.

As in the original the wailing of the wind adds a bleak atmosphere to the action. Local colour is supplied by the sound of kookaburras and African drums on the soundtracks with occasional lapses into crass comical nudges.

Most of the supporting cast appear to be afrikaners dubbed with American voices; but as you would expect the most interesting piece of casting is Vincent Price as gun toting young heroine Diana Iverson's gutsy old prospector grandpa.

Remake of Yellow Sky set in South Africa. Vincent Price gets top billing as the only star in the movie, but his role is not the biggest. The plot is about seven bank robbers who happen upon a ghost town. The only people in the town are gold prospector Price and his daughter (Diana Ivarson). Vincent Price is generally worth recommending any movie for and he's the best thing about this one. Robert Gunner plays the Gregory Peck role from the original as the bandit who falls in love with the daughter. Gunner is OK but no Peck, to put it politely. Blonde beauty Ivarson makes for an unconvincing tomboy. Moving the setting to South Africa is the film's only original feature. I fail to see why they even bothered to do this as it adds nothing to an otherwise typical western. Dull movie.

"Yellow Sky" (1948) was one of the better American westerns of its era. It was also one of Gregory Peck's better starring roles. So, it's a tall order to try to remake the picture, though "The Jackals" does a better job than I expected--especially since it mostly stars folks you probably won't recognize. Aside from Vincent Price (who should not have been listed first in the billing), the rest are actors we probably wouldn't recognize here in the States.

The film begins with seven crooks robbing the bank in the style of the old west--though of course it's South Africa. One is killed in the process and the others beat it across the desert--most likely to die of thirst. However, when they've given up all hope, they happen upon a ghost town that is populated by an old man (Price) and his pretty daughter. These two are not friendly towards the crooks though they do help them find water. Before leaving this little oasis, however, the crooks realize that there MUST be something keeping these two here--and that something is gold. Much of the rest of the film consists of a game of cat and mouse and unless something rather miraculous happens, the granddaughter and grandpa are doomed.

The best thing about "The Jackals" is that instead of setting the film in the same locale as the original, this time it's South Africa. Considering that they, too, had gold fever and there are potentially dangerous natives, it works well. The second best thing is the acting. Very competent and well done all around. Of course, I'd recommend the original first--but this little South African/Australian production has every reason to be proud of this effort--even if the accents were all wrong!

Wholesome South African western, inspired by "Yellow Sky" stars Robert Gunner as Stretch Hawkins, an essentially decent bandit who leads his gang into an all but abandoned mining town where they discover the inhabitants are the peroxide blonde sharp-shooter Ivarson and her elderly grandpa Price. The two have been mining the veins for gold dust and when Hawkins' gang get the scent, they go after the lot, despite Hawkins' making a deal with Price to take only half. Tensions run hot and predictably, the gang implodes on greed.

Aside from mega-star Price, playing a gangly old-timer looking to revive a town on his lucky strike, Gunner stars as the gang's moral compass and equilibrium with his work cut out trying to prevent his men from interfering with Ivarson and fighting amongst themselves. Gunner is something of an enigma in the annals of film history, his brief career resulted in just a handful of movies (notably as stricken astronaut Landon in "The Planet of the Apes") before it abruptly ended. Ivarson looks at times like she's attempting to play a primitive form of woman, raised on gold fever without a maternal role model; to some extent, she achieves the brief. Interestingly like Gunner, Ivarson also failed to nail a film career though she did marry cult-favourite, brawny chrome-domed tough guy Bob Tessier.

Some pleasant scenery of African savanna and the occasional action punctuates what is otherwise a bit of a romantic melodrama. Pretty tame, but not bad all things considered.

This is a vastly inferior remake of YELLOW SKY (1948) – with the ghost town itself now becoming “Yellow Rock”. Apart from the fact that it features Vincent Price in a rare non-horror role from this period (he did appear in a few Westerns early in his career), the film’s most unusual aspect is the fact that it trades the original’s Death Valley landscape for the equally forbidding one of South Africa (with stock footage of wild animals, and Zulus instead of Indians); incidentally, I recently taped another African Western – UNTAMED (1955), with Tyrone Power and Susan Hayward – off Italian TV, which is a title that often turns up in this guise but I’d never managed to check out so far.

Anyway, THE JACKALS duplicates the classic original scene-for-scene and virtually line-by-line; in fact, Lamar Trotti (who adapted the W.R. Burnett source novel to the screen in 1948) is credited as co-writer here as well, even if he had died way back in 1952! The other basic difference between the two versions – other than some ineffective name changes (for instance, the black-clad villain here becomes Dandy rather than Dude) – is that the remake is in color…though the Public Domain print I watched was so faded that day-for-night scenes are blatantly exposed as such! So far so good but, then, the rest of the cast is an anonymous bunch (though Diana Ivarson is O.K., certainly cute and, if anything, even more obviously masculine than Anne Baxter from YELLOW SKY); also, for whatever reason, the character played by Henry Morgan in the original is omitted altogether from the narrative this time around (and, amusingly, the actor taking over John Russell’s womanizing cowboy role looks and sounds just like Oliver Reed!). And, worse still, they’re all saddled with intrusive Australian accents!

As for Price, though top-billed, his part is no bigger than James Barton’s in the 1948 film and he turns in a hammy performance, as was his fashion; for the record, he would return to the genre twice more in the next couple of years – both equally undistinguished films – MORE DEAD THAN ALIVE (1968; available as a DVD rental) and the Elvis Presley vehicle THE TROUBLE WITH GIRLS (1969; which I watched last year in tribute to the 30th anniversary from The King’s death). By the way, I should mention that the film is accompanied by a weird, inappropriate and frankly awful score. Though director Webb had previously helmed three reportedly efficient entries in the genre, this turned out to be a lackluster venture – shabby and lifeless where YELLOW SKY had been stylish and exciting – and it’s small wonder that it proved to be his penultimate work.