The Hanging Tree

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. Karl Malden assumed directing duties for several days when Daves fell ill. The film stars Gary Cooper, Maria Schell, George C. Scott and Malden, 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.