The Hanging Tree

The Hanging Tree (1959)

From The Prize Novel -- A Picture Of Thundering Power!

Joseph "Doc" Frail is a doctor with a past he's trying to outrun. While in Montana, he comes across a mining camp with a hanging tree and rescues a man named Rune from the noose. With Rune as his servant, Frail decides to settle down, and he takes over as town doctor. He meets Elizabeth, who is suffering from shock, and the two soon fall in love. But when Elizabeth is attacked, Frail's attempt to help her lands them both in trouble.

Date of release
1959-02-19
TMDB
6.7 / 10 (131)
Runtime
1h 47m
Genres
Western
Director
Delmer Daves

Casting

Interesting facts

The Hanging Tree is a 1959 American Western film directed by Delmer Daves, based on the novelette The Hanging Tree, written by Dorothy M. Johnson in 1957. The film stars Gary Cooper, Maria Schell, Karl Malden and George C. Scott, and it is set in the gold fields of Montana during the gold rush of the 1860s and 1870s. The story follows a doctor who saves a criminal from a lynch mob, then earns the enmity of several prospectors while trying to protect a young woman whom he has nursed back to health after she was injured in a coach robbery. Karl Malden assumed directing duties for several days when Daves fell ill, and the film represented the first cinematic appearance for George C. Scott.

Production

The film was the first one for Cooper's Baroda Productions company. It was the first film produced by former talent agents Martin Jurow and Richard Shepherd.

Wendell Mayes said "it was the only western that I think that I've ever seen that was a woman's film rather than a man's film—Maria Schell playing the blind heroine was marvelous."

Principal photography was shot on location in the Oak Creek Wildlife Area in the mountains west of Yakima, Washington. The scenes during the opening credits and title, where Gary Cooper rides alongside the river on horseback with a pack horse in tow, were filmed about mid-June in 1958, just northeast of Goose Prairie, Washington, along the north bank of the Bumping River.

The cinematography by Ted McCord made use of full-aperture photography and reduction printing to improve the grain quality of the film. This process involves widening the aperture of the camera to capture a larger image, then reducing the image back to standard size in post-production.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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