The Hanging Tree (1959 film)

The Hanging Tree is a 1959 American Western film directed by Delmer Daves, starring Gary Cooper as Dr. Joseph "Doc" Frail, a frontier physician with a violent past who arrives in a lawless Montana gold-mining camp. The film was adapted by Wendell Mayes and Halsted Welles from Dorothy M. Johnson's 1957 novelette of the same name, and it was produced by Baroda Productions, a company owned by Cooper, and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures.^{1 • 2}

Production

The film was a Baroda Production, a company owned by Gary Cooper for the purpose of selecting and producing hand-picked projects, and Cooper's daughter Maria Cooper Janis later wrote that the film was particularly close to his heart, resonating with his Montana childhood and giving him a chance to play a much darker role than audiences were used to.^{2 • 5} Daves, who had directed well-regarded Westerns such as Jubal (1956), 3:10 to Yuma (1957), and The Badlanders (1958), was chosen to direct.²

Filming. The picture was shot on location near Yakima, Washington, from mid-June to mid-August 1958, with the mining town of Skull Creek built for the production; specific locations included Nile, Yakima, and Goose Prairie, Washington.^{2 • 6} The town set was built south of Little Rattlesnake Creek near Nile; nothing remains of it, but the site became known as Hanging Tree Campground.⁷ During filming Cooper suffered hip pain from an earlier career injury, which made riding difficult and produced his character's distinctive lean to the left in the saddle, a physical habit Cooper incorporated into Frail's characterization.²

The directing change. According to the film's daily production reports, Daves's last day on the production was 25 July 1958, after which he became too ill to direct and was hospitalized for ulcers. Karl Malden, who had recently directed his first film, Time Limit (1957), was approached to complete the film despite reservations; Cooper encouraged him and offered his support, and Malden guided the film through the end of post-production recording. Vincent Sherman served as co-director on 30 July 1958 only.^{1 • 2} Malden later recalled that Cooper could not be directed in words: told how a scene should be done, Cooper said "Show me," and Malden acted it out with Maria Schell before Cooper performed exactly what was wanted.²

Cast and reception

The film marked the screen debuts of George C. Scott, in the scene-stealing role of Dr. George Grubb, a wild-eyed religious fanatic and alcoholic, and of the playwright and stage actor Ben Piazza as Rune. Maria Schell, an Austrian actress, made her first American film as Elizabeth Mahler, a role TCM's Jeff Stafford describes as more complex than those usually given to women in Westerns.^{1 • 2 • 5}

On release the film received respectable reviews but was not a big box office hit; Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote that Daves had directed the gold camp action for "a great deal of clatter and bang" and that the story was "absorbing to the end."² The Variety review of 28 January 1959 praised the cast's performances while finding that the title song, though good, suffered by comparison with the realism of the final scene.⁸ On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes the film holds 89% on the Tomatometer from 9 reviews and 73% on the audience Popcornmeter from more than 1,000 ratings.⁹

Music

Max Steiner wrote the score, and the title song, with music by Jerry Livingston and lyrics by Mack David, was sung by Marty Robbins over the opening and closing credits; it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song.^{2 • 1} A music-theoretical study notes that unlike High Noon (1952), where the title song expresses what the stoic hero cannot say, in The Hanging Tree the song is meant to be the story itself, and "hanging tree themes" musically saturate the film even though the tree itself does not appear frequently on screen.⁸

Legacy

Underrated at the time of its release, the film is now considered a superior Western from the waning years of the genre, and one of Cooper's best performances from his final decade, comparable to his work in High Noon (1952) and Man of the West (1958).² It was Daves's last Western, and the entry in The BFI Companion to the Western calls it his most complex and ambitious film, praising its dramatic use of space; TCM notes that its detailed depiction of the mining camp looks ahead to Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971).^{2 • 3} A Cambridge volume on Daves's career treats the film, alongside The Red House (1947) and Spencer's Mountain (1963), as evidence that his interest in social progress was a sustained concern across genres and decades.¹⁰

References

1. The Hanging Tree (1959), AFI Catalog of Feature Films
2. Jeff Stafford, "The Hanging Tree" (2010), Turner Classic Movies
3. Leonard Quart, "From the Archives: The Hanging Tree," Cineaste Magazine, Winter 2012
4. The Hanging Tree (1959), TCM movie page
5. "The Hanging Tree," Gary Cooper official site, notes by Maria Cooper Janis
6. The Hanging Tree (1959), Filming & production, IMDb
7. Washington State Film Locations: The Hanging Tree (1959)
8. Elizabeth Sayrs, "Narrative, Metaphor, and Conceptual Blending in 'The Hanging Tree,'" Music Theory Online 9.1 (2003)
9. The Hanging Tree, Rotten Tomatoes
10. "Changing Societies: The Red House, The Hanging Tree, Spencer's Mountain, and Post-war America," ReFocus: The Films of Delmer Daves, Cambridge University Press

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026

© 2026 Biostate AI. Free to use with credit under the Edgepedia Community License. Embed a reference card.