Review of Duel in the Sun

More critical nonsense has perhaps been written about "Duel in the Sun" than about any other U.S. made film. It is a big, intelligent and well-acted western. It had the great King Vido as the director for much of its beautiful footage,, plus contributions by several other very-fine directors. it was adapted from a good little novel by Niven Busch, with a script credited to Oliver H.P. Garrett as adaptation to the screen and to Ben Hecht and David Selznick for the screenplay. Th sterling cinematography was done by the great lee Garmes, Harodl Rosson and Ray Rennahan, with production design by J. McMillan Johnson and art direction by James Basevi. Costumes were the work of famous designer Walter Punkett. Dimitri Tiomkin did the music and producer Selznick spared no expense to make this project work. He also quarreled with Vidor over the production, and is probably responsible for the literate but needless fatality element and narrated prologue that alter the production a bit but do not harm it badly. The argument by so-called critics has been about "scale". Selznick, trying to repeat his triumph with "Gone With the Wind" they argued, kept trying to make his films 'bigger'--as if that were the key to an even-greater achievement in cinema for Selznick. But in this novel, the author is the one who suggested that the saloon in which the central character's mother dances was very large; I believe Selznick took this and the size of the desolate country within which the action takes place as cues for him to increase the physical scale of the drama. And for the most part, his decision seems to me to have been unarguably a good one. Many of the shots from Vidor and the other directors are legendary--riders racing along the tops of hills in silhouette against colorful skies, spacious interiors at the Spanish Bit ranch, the sump-hole sequence, the great dance sequence that ignites the action at the film's beginning, the train wreck disasters and many more... The story-line can actually be stated rather swiftly. Pearl Chavez is the daughter of an exotic female who dances and is married to a ne'er-do-well cultured fellow, a distant cousin of the wife of Senator McCanles, owner of a huge ranch in the 1880s. After her father kills his mother over a lover, and is hanged, Pearl is sent to live with the McCanles family. From the first, one son, Jesse, a lawyer, is attracted to her and she to Lewton, the wild cowboy scion of the family. She worries a lot about sin, but to no avail, since the viewer never sees any. What happens is a land dispute, which alienates Jesse from the senator and sends Lewt on a rampage against the railroad who has challenged his father's empire of cattle and dictatorial pseudo-benevolent despotism. he is also angry that Pearl has sent him away after being his lover. Realizing that she is as responsible as anyone for what Lewt has become, blaming her own sexuality for his wrongness, she goes after him and they shoot each other to rags on a desolate hillside, as they were perhaps fated to do in a U.S. mental environment of pseudo-Christian surrealism that helped make the Judge, Lewt and Pearl what they felt they had to be--and also set Jesse, the normative mind in the piece, as an outsider watching the dissolution of their hopes. The critics who have called the film never-dull, bizarre and a product of Selznick's tampering with the script have all been obviously correct; but as some have noted, when it is big the film is very good and memorable. From the great theme song to the powerful scenes, much of this re-engineered-fatalistic drama works. In the leads, Gregory Peck is handsome and showy, which he needs to be, to outshine his attractive but less-charismatic brother, very ably portrayed by Joseph Cotten. Lionel Barrymore does well as the dictatorial senator, and Lillian Gish as his wife proves to be very skilled indeed. Herbert Marshall as Scott Chavez and Tilly Losch are extremely fine; other very able supporting actors in the large cast who show to advantage include Walter Huston as a sin-killing preacher, Charles Bickford, Sidney Blackmer, Butterfly McQueen, Joan Tetzel, Scott McKay, Harray Caray and Otto Kruger. The central performer in the film is Jennifer Jones. I found her quiet and intelligent portrayal to be outstanding in every regard; she was lovely, repressed, sensual, bright, feral and tormented by turns. If Selznick intended this film as a showcase for his wife's wide range of acting abilities, I suggest it worked just about as intended. What is 'bizarre' about the film as a project, I suggest, apart from Selznick's torturing a simple melodrama into an epic drama and very cleverly too is that he then tried to reduce his splendid project to a diatribe against sensuality in order to turn its ending into a work of fate, or a commentary on human weakness. The two strains work against one another in the film at certain times, diminishing however only a little of the film's unusual power, only channeling it toward occasional exaggeration. A splendid piece of film-making by Vidor and every one of the actors and creators involved in its realization