Saturday Night Cinema: Duel In The Sun

Tonight’s Saturday Night Classic Film is Duel In The Sun, with Gregory Peck (playing against type as the wild and malevolent brother), Joseph Cotton (Abel to Peck’s Cain), and the wild and gorgeous Jennifer Jones. It’s as one amateur reviewer coined it, “A grand scale horse opera.” Duel in the Sun (1946) was branded “Lust in the Dust” at the time of its release, and it’s a bit silly and lurid, but great fun. Think of it as a half-baked western style Gone With the Wind.

Directed by King Vidor and written by David O. Selznick (who stole Jennifer Jones away from husband Robert Walker — who never recovered from the loss).

In this film, Jennifer Jones stars as half-breed Pearl Chavez, whom everyone has tagged as a “bad girl.” She is taken into the home of wealthy, greedy rancher McCanles. Almost immediately, Pearl becomes the object of an emotional tug-of-war between McCanles’ virtuous son Jesse and wicked ne’er-do-well offspring Lewt.

‘ Duel in the Sun,’ Selznick’s Lavish Western That Stars Jennifer Jones, Gregory Peck, Opens at Loew’s Theatres
By BOSLEY CROWTHER, New York Times,
Published: May 8, 1947

There’s a new sales technique in film business which has been rather cleverly evolved from scientific audience researching. It is this: If the public’s “want to see” for a forthcoming picture samples higher than the reactions of test audiences, you sell your picture in a hurry before the curious have a chance to get wise. It follows, of course, the old pitch theory that you can fool all of the people some of the time provided your ballyhoo is super and you don’t stick around too long.

That, we suspect, is one reason why David O. Selznick’s “Duel in the Sun,” as much ballyhooed a movie as we’ve had since “Gone With the Wind,” was launched yesterday not only at the Capitol on Broadway but in thirty-eight (count ’em) houses of the Loew’s circuit in and around New York. For, despite all his flashy exploitation, Mr. Selznick can’t long hide the fact that his multimillion-dollar Western is a spectacularly disappointing job.

Those are harsh words for a movie upon which the producer of some memorably fine films has lavished some mighty production and close to a dozen stars. Those are also harsh words about a picture which promises very much and which, even for all its disappointments, has some flashes of brilliance in it. But the ultimate banality of the story and its juvenile slobbering over sex (or should we say “primitive passion,” as says a ponderous foreword?) compels their use.

Reduced to its bare essentials and cleared of a clutter of clichés worn thin in a hundred previous Westerns, Mr. Selznick’s two-hour-and-a-quarter tale is that of a sun-blistered romance involving a half-breed Indian girl and two dagger-eyed Texas brothers, one of them good and the other very bad. That, as a plot, might be sufficient for a sort of O’Neillian frontier tragedy—and, indeed, once or twice it looks faintly as though this might turn into a valid “Desire Under the Sun.” Also, the locale of this fable—a baronial Texas ranch, ruled by a scalawag father wed to a faded flower of the Old South—and the incidental details of the raw life are sufficient to a drama of some point.

But Mr. Selznick, who wrote it from a novel by Niven Busch (and, we suspect, with occasional reference to Margaret Mitchell’s famous tome), seems to have been more anxious to emphasize the clash of love and lust than to seek some illumination of a complex of arrogance and greed. As a consequence, most of the picture is devoted to the romantic quirks of a tawny-skinned Scarlett O’Hara who wants the noble brother with her heart but can’t help loving the scoundrel with her notably feeble flesh.

Okay. On that elemental level, Mr. Selznick has turned quite a trick of lurid and lickerish illustration, by leave of the Production Code. He has got through some scenes of fancy wooing between Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones, the bad boy and the half-breed doxy, and he has flashed a few broad suggestions. He—and his director, King Vidor—have also whipped up some eye-dazzling scenes of wide-open ranching and frontiering, all in color of the very best, of course. Indeed, some of the compositions, achieved with color and musical backgrounds, evoke sudden and singular sensations that are conspicuously superior to the whole. Oh, brother—if only the dramatics were up to the technical style!

But they’re not. Nor are the performances, which are strangely uneven—all of them. The best and the most consistent is that of Mr. Peck, who makes of the renegade brother a credibly vicious and lawless character, and the next best is that of Walter Huston as a frontier evangelist. This is the role to which objection was voiced by elements on the West Coast and which was consequently trimmed by editing, as well as piously excused in an appended foreword. That seems to us unfortunate, for Mr. Huston’s pungent thundering in this role is one of the bits of characterization which has real flavor and significance.

As the desert flower, cause of all the turmoil, Miss Jones gives occasional glints of the pathos of loneliness and heartbreak, but mostly she has to pretend to be the passion-torn child of nature in the loosest theatrical style. The final scene, in which she punctures Mr. Peck with several well-aimed rifle shots, is wounded herself and then crawls to him across the rocks to die with him in his arms, is one of those chunks of theatrics that ranks with Liza crossing the ice. Likewise, Lillian Gish and Lionel Barrymore are pretty porky as the Texas tycoons, and Joseph Cotten, Charles Bickford and many others are no better—nor worse—than the script allows.

However, we don’t want to scare you. “Duel in the Sun” is still something to see—provided you understand clearly that it is the bankroll and not the emotions by which you will be shocked.

No stage show is being presented at the Capitol during the run of “Duel in the Sun.”

DUEL IN THE SUN, screen play by David O. Selznick, adopted by Oliver H. P. Garrett from a novel by Niven Busch; directed by King Vidor; produced by Mr. Selznick and released by Selznick Releasing Organization. At the Capitol and Loew’s theatres.
Pearl Chavez . . . . . Jennifer Jones
Lewt McCanles . . . . . Gregory Peck
Jesse McCanles . . . . . Joseph Cotten
Senator McCanles . . . . . Lionel Barrymore
Mrs. McCanles . . . . . Lillian Gish
Sam Pierce . . . . . Charles Bickford
Vashti . . . . . Butterfly McQueen
“The Sinkiller” . . . . . Walter Huston
Scott Chavez . . . . . Herbert Marshall
Mrs. Chavez . . . . . Tilly Losch
The Lover . . . . . Sidney Blackmer
Lem Smoot . . . . . Harry Carey
Sid . . . . . Scott Kruger
Mr. Langford . . . . . Otto Kruger
Helen Langford . . . . . Joan Tetzel
Sheriff . . . . . Charles Dingle