Duel in the Sun (1946)

Gregory Peck as a bag guy, oh my!

This has always been one of my favorites westerns, although I never went to the trouble of getting a DVD version, until it came up on my Amazon recommendation list. I ordered it right away, and received the usual good Amazon service, and quick, free shipping, and have not been disappointed. Gregory Peck is one of best actors, and makes the movie, playing the bad guy this time, instead of his usual hero role. I can personally recommend this movie, going against a number of the negative reviews that are posted here. July 13, 2008

A "Bad Movie We Love" Must-See!!!!

We who love Bad Movies positively worship David Selznick's overproduced, overwritten, overwrought DUEL IN THE SUN. This film was Selznick's futile effort to make a sex symbol our of his Oscar-winning girlfriend Jennifer Jones by casting her as a wanton half-breed Injun gal who makes men's blood turn to, well, firewater. You've got to wonder about the private life of any famed movie producer who writes a script expressly for his young actress protegee that includes self-appraisals such as: "I'm trash, I tell ya, trash!" and "I know what ya think, that I'm trashy like my ma!" and, best of all, "Trash, trash, trash, trash, TRASH!"

This two-hour-plus saga of what happens when half-caste Jones is brought to live within the walls of the McCanles homestead -- wild son Gregory Peck goes insane, nice son Joseph Cotten leaves home, decent mama Lillian Gish expires from all the excitement, and sinister father Lionel Barrymore cracks such one-liners as "Is that what they're wearing in wigwams these days?" -- lends itself irresistibly to the interpretation that this is a Hollywood insider's look at the effect Jones actually had on the married Selznick home life when their romance began. How else to explain away the self-indulgence of Barrymore begging for Gish's forgiveness as she is dying? "It don't seem possible but I musta been wrong about a whole lotta things," weeps Barrymore -- a thought that apparently never occured to Selznick when writing this script.

And for that matter, what on earth was Selznick telling himself as he watched the dailies of Jones, all heaving breasts in off-the-shoulder gypsy blouses, whispering, "I wanna be a lady. Will ya learn me?" Happily, no one can, so she falls in love with the handsome but psychopathic Peck, who nicknames her his "bobtailed little half-breed" (She calls him "varmint"). Peck loves her so much he kills every one of her decent suitors, including his own brother. (Presumably, things weren't quite this out of hand around Casa Selznick, since all the kids survived.)

The jaw-dropping, justifiably infamous finale of DUEL IN THE SUN has these two bad-for-each-other lovers shooting it out in a mountaintop, then crawling --- slowly, s-l-o-w-l-y (the sequence lasts a mind-boggling eight minutes!) --- across the rocky terrain for one last embrace. "Lemme hold ya, little bobcat," Peck says, before they kiss and die. Incredibly, unbelievably, both Jones and Selznick worked again after DUEL IN THE SUN.

Directed by King Vidor (quite a maestro with crawling scenes: see BEYOND THE FOREST).
March 23, 2008

Turgid Is The Word.....

My quick opinion: 3 stars because I'm sentimental about the great stars in it. The fatal flaw, picked up on decades ago--and correctly--is that the emotions are overwrought, the characters underdeveloped, and the attempts to create genuine emotional tension, and involvement on the part of the viewer, too calculated and artificial to be "real". Rightfully assessed as a failed attempt to reproduce the oomph of "Gone With The Wind". It's basically a turgid, forced melodrama, despite the best scene-chewing efforts of the admittedly sexy Jennifer Jones and a very against-type Gregory Peck. A legendary film, but not a great one. "Lust In The Dust" indeed. February 20, 2008

A love with two faces!

"Duel in the sun" is the "Gone with the wind" of the Western genre. The movie begins with a warning, a cactus flower that epitomizes and warns us about the tragic love of Perla Chavez , a free and gentle flower who grew wild, a half bred girl who was born signed by the disgrace. She is witness of her mother' s death by the hands of her own father, who sends her to his second cousin Laura Belle, happily married with a wealthy Senator and mother of two sons; Jesse, the good guy and prominent lawyer (Joseph Cotten) and Lewton , the bad seed of the family (Gregory Peck). Both of them will be engaged by this sensual woman at the same moment she arrives to the "Little Spain" ranch.

The plot suggests us much more that it shows, the febrile passion she feels for one is compensated by the candid love she feels for the other one, but she knows about her origin and nothing in this world will be capable to redeem her.

King Vidor was the director of this mature sex western that still stands out as one the most superb westerns ever made. As a matter of fact it has everything you demands about a western, legal clashes between the arrival of the railroad in these lands, a sublime photography, unforgettable scenes supported by the depth of field that remits us to John Ford's style but with a particular taste, fabulous performances of all the cast, not only the presence of Lyonel Barrymore justifies plainly your inversion, but the smart idea to hire the veteran Walter Huston in the role of preacher after his unforgettable role in "The devil and Daniel Webster" was emblematic and even mordacious

To my view, one of the twenty westerns in all time.
February 17, 2008

A highly original piece of work that remains impressive, baroque folly, not least for the final scene...

King Vidor was a long-serving and much-respected Hollywood grandmaster who took a serious interest in movie-making... "Billy the Kid" and "Duel in the Sun" hold an important place in the history of the genre... These two films in particular, along with "Northwest Passage," show Vidor's romantic vision of backwoods America and his love of natural landscape; they share, too, an earthy quality which is missing from his more routine action Westerns, "The Texas Rangers" and "Man Without a Star."

Photographed in rich color, the visual magnificence of the film was manifested in the shots of the cowboys galloping across the rolling hills; in the spectacular confrontation between the McCanles forces who aimed to defend Spanish Bit with lead and the U.S. Cavalry; in the deep red sunset sequence with Lionel Barymore as "the lonely Senator"; and in that long shot of the surreptitious meeting between Lewt and his father on the hilltop at sunset...

"Duel in the Sun" is extravagantly and grandiosely passionate and romantic and its characters are much larger than life... A poignant scene was the tremendous moment between two legendary actors (Lionel Barrymore & Lillian Gish) when Laura Belle said to her husband "I'm a nuisance to you even to the end. It's the first time you've been in this room since that night./I loved you, Laura Belle. Yes, sir, I loved you."

Now, when a single movie offers murder, rape, attempted fratricide, train wreck, fiery sensual dance, drunkenness, religion, range wars, prostitution, sacred and profane love and sex as the principal motivation and not as an incidental subplot, and all that against an epic background of empire-building, well, it is for the first time in a Western in such a big scale...

The film featured the story of Pearl Chavez whose past is dark as her coca-stained skin and who loves everybody but loves bad Lewt most often...

Gregory Peck character as Lewt is barbaric, undisciplined, untamed, overwhelming... He is a bad man, all bad, but he is also the lowest, dirtiest, meanest and cool, and he knows how to laugh and have a good time...

Jennifer Jones as Pearl, is the 'prettiest girl ever to set foot on Spanish Bit.' She is a marvelous overwrought minx, wild and sexy...

Joseph Cotton is the calm, educated, refined, pleasant son Jesse who ultimately sides with the railroad against his father...He even threatens to cut the fence wire promising: "I'd rather be on the side of the victims than of the murderers."

Lionel Barrymore is the invalid Senator Jackson McCanles who orders his son, calling him a "Judas," to leave his ranch for as long as he lives...

Lillian Gish is the delicate Laura Belle who blames her husband of spoiling Lewt and she let him do so ever since he was a child making him think that rules weren't made for him...

Herbert Marshall plays Scott Chavez the condemned Southern aristocrat gentleman who sends his daughter to Laura Belle, his second cousin...

Charles Bickford plays Sam Pierce, the boss who gets a little ranch of his own but never run across anybody he wanted to marry... Besides, he never got up nerve enough to ask anybody...

Impassions, pulsating, barbaric, and thunderous, the music matches perfectly the fervid emotionalism of the story...

The film received only two Academy Awards nominations... December 30, 2007

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