Duel in the Sun

Franklin, William Cameron Menzies, David O. Selznick, Josef von Sternberg

Some movies age well, others don’t. I have a feeling that, even when David O. Selznick’s Duel in the Sun was new, at least some audiences must have thought it a bad-taste head-scratcher. Over-produced in every respect, this epic Big Ranch western is a clear case of a slight story hyped beyond all reason. Yet it’s compulsively watchable. For technique and art-craft, it can also be exciting and beautiful.

How to explain the existence of this movie? Consider it David O. Selznick’s Taj Mahal, an attempt to do for his new wife Jennifer Jones what Scarlett O’Hara did for Vivien Leigh. It was easy enough to throw an unprecedented bundle of money at the screen. Selznick’s stab at duplicating the success of his Gone With the Wind in the Western genre is one of the weirdest epics of all time, an undeniably entertaining mix of powerful filmmaking and witless clichés. Released with a saturation booking scheme, it reportedly became one of the most profitable Westerns ever. Duel was chided by the public as Lust In The Dust, in reaction to heroine Pearl Chavez’ oversexed histrionics. There’s nothing unsubtle about it: compelling emotions and jaw-dropping crudity alternate without a chance to catch one’s breath. Modern audiences laugh uncontrollably at excessive scenes, only to applaud an impressive moment a few minutes later.

Selznick’s apparent aim was to out-do every western ever made. Epic destinies play out on the vast Texas plain: orphaned half-breed Pearl Chavez (Jennifer Jones) comes to Spanish Bit, a Ponderosa-like cattle ranch run by despotic ex- Senator Jackson McCandless (Lionel Barrymore). There she finds kindness in the heart of Jackson’s Southern-born wife Laura Belle (Lillian Gish). But Pearl’s innocent/erotic presence splits the empire. Ivy-league son Jesse (Joseph Cotten) is disillusioned when his malevolent brother Lewton (played against type by Gregory Peck) openly seduces Pearl. Both sons are forced to leave the ranch, Pearl agonizes in sexual self-loathing (“Trash! Trash! Trash!”), and the picture self-destructs in an orgy of blazing Technicolor sunsets, bombastic music, and vengeful shootouts. Oh yes, and Orson Welles provides narrative bookends!

Duel in the Sun’s plot and structure is proof that Selznick learned all the wrong lessons from his fevered micromanagement of GWTW. The simple story is overproduced in ways that add little to the overall impact. Several directors quit over producer interference and Selznick kept scores of writers on hand to constantly re-do scenes. Without the tempering aid of GWTW’s William Cameron Menzies (or perhaps, the calm behind-the-scenes story sense of Val Lewton) Selznick’s endless second-guessing and book-length memos ran riot.

The film’s jumble of rewrites and reshoots is such that some scenes seem invented just to hold the plotline together. An insignificant cowboy character named Sid (Scott McKay) keeps showing up to deliver dumb messages and awkward exposition. Pearl is molested by the rape-crazy Lewton in at least three almost identical scenes; in one she graduates from protesting waif to brazen harlot in an on-camera transformation comparable to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or The Wolf Man. The whole picture has that kind of producer-induced overkill that screams, ‘where’s my Oscar nomination?’ When Pearl runs Scarlett-like down a hill from the ranch house, you can see Selznick’s desperation to make lightning strike twice.

Selznick’s racial attitudes haven’t improved, unfortunately. Butterfly McQueen is back as a twitter-pated housemaid, an even more exaggerated character than before. Pearl’s Father and Selznick’s spokesman for lost values and decency Scott Chavez (Herbert Marshall), states at his trial that his real crime was not murder, but taking a Mexican wife and thereby despoiling his family name. Invited by the rather ditzy Laura Belle to steer Pearl in the right moral direction, Walter Huston chews up the scenery as The Sinkiller, a frontier revivalist. He warns Pearl away from the evils of the flesh while obviously lusting after her himself. Pearl Chavez may begin as an innocent, but her ‘hot’ Latin blood all but guarantees that she reveal herself as a wanton tramp: “Trash! Trash! Trash!”

Even when the characters make little sense, the acting in Duel in the Sun is excellent. Jennifer Jones was never better as Pearl, whether writhing in sexual frustration or smashing herself onto jagged rocks for the bloody finale. Gregory Peck’s villainy goes against his usual underplayed decency and is great fun to watch. In the similar The Big Country a decade later Peck seems anemic by comparison. Joseph Cotten hasn’t much to do considering that this film is his second romantic pairing with Jones. Of the rest of the cast Lillian Gish is a standout in a part that might be an extension of her character in Birth of a Nation. Played in silent-movie expressionist mode, her isolated scenes make a good case for ‘primitive’ acting in a decade of more modern styles.

On the other hand, the presence of Gish shows that David O. Selznick’s idea of entertainment hadn’t progressed since the silent era. From this point on his creative overstatement and production meddling ruined or crippled movie after movie. His next picture Portrait of Jennie is a masterpiece, but only if one can wade through its repetitive ‘poetic’ preambles and overdone appeals for sentiment.

The epic western overflows with sidebar characters in isolated narrative pockets. Charles Bickford has a nothing role as an honest cowpoke who isn’t in on the joke, the joke being that he’ll be a dead duck soon after declaring his love for Pearl Chavez. Fans of Rosemary’s Baby probably won’t recognize the evil Adrian Marcato (Sidney Blackmer): he plays the lover of Pearl Chavez’ mother (Tilly Losch) in the giant barroom dance scene that begins Duel. The fiery dance is a standout set-piece. The smoke-filled saloon has a bar the size of a tennis court, and the bar-top is the stage for Tilly’s dance. It’s more opulent than Barnum and Bailey’s Circus, yet located in some nameless ‘town down on the border.’ Former Broadway star Losch appeared in only a couple of movies; her impressive dance to Dimitri Tiomkin’s ‘savage’ Mexican music ends with a push-in to a huge upside-down close-up.

As soon as we film students learned that Josef von Sternberg was one of the many name directors that worked on DITS we assumed that this atmospheric opening was his work. But according to the records this isn’t so; von Sternberg mainly helped stylize the incredible close-ups of Selznick’s beloved JJ. The scholars attribute Duel’s basic vitality and most of its key scenes to master moviemaker King Vidor. The dance opening was reportedly directed by Vidor’s replacement William Dieterle.

Elsewhere reigns giddy chaos. The opening narration is a mawkish jumble that only a pro like Orson Welles could navigate. Savant prefers to remember Randy Cook’s alliterative version, read in his best Orson Welles voice: “…and Pearl Chavez, the half-breed from South of the Border, so early to bloom and so early to die, keeping a reckless rendezvous with her Laughing Cowboy Lover Lewt.” The final love-hate gun-down is one of the most over-cooked camp highlights in the movie history. For some unfathomable reason, King Vidor more or less remade this ending seven years later for his Ruby Gentry. In that movie, Charlton Heston is the lucky lover-boy gunned down by rifle totin’ Jennifer.

Gregory Peck looks like he’s having a hell of a good time being such a wicked cuss. The truly stupid Lewt McCandless never seems threatening, but he is mighty ‘spirited’ when repeatedly raping Jennifer Jones, getting his face scratched in the process. Peck’s real highlight is a must-see scene in which he tames an uncooperative horse. It swings him like a school bell, but Peck doesn’t let go. That’s of course a comment on the brute force Lewt uses to bend Pearl to his will.

More than a few critics have commented on what seems a particularly creepy Svengali-Trilby relationship between Selznick and Jones. The mental image is of St. Bernadette being lured away from an age-appropriate husband by an all-controlling monster of a producer, who then decides that she’s going to reach the pinnacle of stardom by playing a sex-crazed ‘exotic’ in a giant western soap opera. Poor Pearl protests, but the story’s message is that she’s a hot-blooded non-white savage that wants to be raped by Lewt. Jennifer Jones is always better than good. It’s just that the lumpy screenplay stretches character credibility far beyond the breaking point. By the end things simply become hilarious, with poor Pearl switching from murderous rage, to anguished passion, and back to murderous rage. It’s Very Enjoyable Nonsense, writ large.