The Pacific Northwestern: The Hanging Tree
February 10, 2026
In his final western (set in a Montana gold rush town but filmed entirely in the wilderness near Yakima), Gary Cooper stars as Joseph Frail, a doctor who finds his life complicated while nursing a Swiss immigrant back to health.
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Tuesday, February 10, 2026
"You’re standing on the edge of a cliff, I don’t advise you to go through life with your eyes closed.”
Adapted from Dorothy Johnson’s novel of the same name, the final western of Delmer Daves and its star tells the story of Joseph Frail (Gary Cooper), a doctor outrunning his painful past by setting up a medical practice in the gold rush town of Skull Creek. In the aftermath of a nearby stagecoach robbery, the community organizes a search party led by Frenchy (Karl Malden), who discovers sole survivor Elizabeth Mahler (Maria Schell). Doc Frail takes the burned, dehydrated, and temporarily blinded Swedish immigrant under his care, but his medical books fail to address the emotional trauma. "Why don't they try to learn what happens inside?” he bemoans over his reference guides, “That's where the damage is done." With compassion and grace, they find their way past blindness literal and metaphysical.
Delmer Daves directed nine elegant westerns, each with a careful eye for landscape and history. Though nominally set in Montana, Daves shot the film amidst the rugged beauty of the Naches and Yakima region of Washington, depicting the camp with an attention to detail that informs much of the mining town in McCabe and Mrs Miller. His tender direction of Cooper and Mahler reaches transcendent emotional heights only possible within the classic Hollywood studio system; it also never hurts to have Marty Robbins crooning in one of the greatest original songs ever written for the screen to help us reach these peaks.
“Daves could use a crane as if it were a musical instrument.”—Jonathan Rosenbaum
“Daves is an absolute rarity in cinema, an artist of the good.”—Kent Jones, Criterion
- Director: Delmer Daves
- Principal Cast: Gary Cooper, Maria Schell, Karl Malden, George C. Scott, Karl Swenson
- Country: USA
- Year: 1959
- Running Time: 107 min.
- Producer: Martin Jurow, Richard Shepherd
- Screenplay: Wendell Mayes, Halsted Welles, based on the novel by Dorothy M. Johnson
- Cinematographers: Ted McCord
- Editors: Owen Marks
- US Distributor: Warner Brothers