From the 1940s: Duel in the Sun

1946 Western

From Selznick International

Directed by King Vidor

Starring

Jennifer Jones

Gregory Peck

Joseph Cotten

Lionel Barrymore

Lillian Gish

Herbert Marshall

Walter Huston

Charles Bickford

Harry Carey

Butterfly McQueen

Joan Tetzel

Scott McKay

Tilly Losch

Sidney Blackmer

Of the many memories I have of seeing this film over the years, there is nothing more burned inside me than the image of the fiery Jennifer Jones in by far the sexiest role she ever had and I dare say one of the sexiest any actress ever had in a western.  Adding to that image is that her character of Pearl Chavez is sexually frustrated and her fighting, clawing undulating, sweating and acting out is what gave this film some clout.

While Jones never had another role close to this one (some might say Ruby Gentry tried), some of the same could be said about Gregory Peck.  Most of the actor's wonderful performances are ones in which he holds his emotions in check but not here.  Here he almost seems to act outside of himself.  He, too, is sexy and also unruly and dangerously outgoing.  His Lewt McCanles is not a nice man and he drives Pearl crazy with his mixed messages.

Some would call the story and the film overblown and while I cannot deny that, it has never gotten in the way of my enjoyment of it.  It opens big with Tilly Losch, as Pearl's Native American mother, doing a wild and sexy dance on top of a huge oblong bar in a saloon that seems to have hundreds of men watching.  While Losch, who choreographed her dance, gyrates to the throbbing sounds of kettle drums, her lover (Blackmer) waits for her.

Pearl's white father is on to his wife's indiscretions and sets up killing her and her lover.  Before he is hanged he sends Pearl off to live with distant white relatives who live on a huge Texas cattle ranch called Spanish Bit.  Here lives his gentle second cousin and former lover (Gish), her tyrannical wheelchair-bound husband, an ex-senator (Barrymore) and their two grown sons, the ill-behaved Lewt and the gentlemanly Jesse (Cotten).

The mother takes to Pearl right off and tells her the ambition is to turn her into a lady.  Pearl is skeptical but agreeable.  The senator hates her from the start, somewhat understandably, but his bias against her racial background brings the family much unhappiness. Pearl herself is caught up in her affection for both brothers.  Loving Jesse would be a step up in her quest for becoming a lady and she is beholden due to his kindness.  And Jesse grows to love her.

The brothers don't get along and it's made worse because of her penchant for Lewt's lusty attention.  Two things happen that cause Jesse distress.  One is that he catches Pearl in Lewt's dark bedroom in the early morning.  The other is that when his father has a dispute with railroad men who lawfully want to lay track across his land. Jesse takes the side of the railroad which results in the father kicking Jesse off Spanish Bit.

As the story progresses we see that Lewt spends much of his time teasing Pearl with his attention.  His aspirations are carnal while she has fallen in love.  Little by little he teases until she's so hot and bothered that she can hardly stand it and he then jumps on his horse, laughing and galloping all the way.

Pearl sees she made an error with Jesse and as she's about to do something to correct it, she realizes that Jesse has fallen in love with a woman (Tetzel) he is about to marry.  At the same time she meets an older neighbor (Bickford) who falls in love with her and wants to marry.  She likes him very much but tells him she doesn't love him.  He doesn't care and believes in time she will so they decide to marry.

Lewt all of a sudden acts like the rejected suitor and kills the unarmed Bickford.  The law comes after him but he runs.  He tells Pearl, smarting from Bickford's death but still caught in her love-hate relationship with Lewt, that he is heading off to Mexico and as she excitedly starts to pack her few things, tells her he's going alone.  If she had a break with sanity, it comes here.  It's the final straw.

SPOILER ALERT:

Lewt heads out to Squaw's Head Rock for the movie's famous but highly theatrical ending.  Soon Pearl is in hot pursuit with a burning intensity to kill him.  Lewt spots her from his lofty perch and yells.  She responds by shooting him and he tumbles off the rock.  Suddenly she feels bad and as she starts up to him, he shoots her.  She crawls up the mountain (a grueling scene in which Jones was injured) and they wrap themselves up in one another's arms and both die.  Shakespeare visits the Old West.

To understand much of the film at all requires a basic familiarity of David O. Selznick, whose baby this film is.  Only a man with gargantuan appetites could produce such a gargantuan canvas for a story that doesn't warrant it.  It's not that I find all that much wrong with the story because I don't but I can't say it warrants the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey texture Selznick has given it.

He was not a particularly nice man.  He was an excessive amphetamine user who went manic over everything he did.  He sent off hundreds of rambling notes, particularly but not exclusively, to directors which resulted in bad tempers, behavioral issues, firings, headaches and other sicknesses and changes.  Many people found him the most infuriating person they ever worked with or for.

Selznick always felt a little wrong side of the tracks when it came to the Hollywood elite... and this despite marrying one of MGM kingpin Louis B. Mayer's daughters.  After leaving MGM he produced a number of films and then he started up his own production company, Selznick International, and in doing so coined the term executive producer.  To offset his lack of recognition, he became obsessed with making everything he touched bigger... the best... the most this or that... gargantuan.  

He then produced the film, Gone with the Wind, and his life was never the same.  He would always feel he needed to top GWTW or for God's sake at least make something every bit as good and that clearly never happened.  But that didn't mean he wouldn't keep trying and get odder and more peculiar as he trotted along.

Duel in the Son was written as a novel by Niven Busch.  He saw the role of Pearl as being perfect for his wife, Teresa Wright.  There must have been some pillow talk involved there or Busch must have lost all objectivity because I can think of few actresses less suitable to play the lusty Pearl than Wright.  Oliver Garrett is given screen credit for the adaptation of the novel but in actuality a number of writers did a little typing.  It was probably how Selznick told them he didn't like what they'd written that was so confrontational.

There were a half dozen directors working on the project, including, of course, Selznick himself, but sole screen credit was given to King Vidor, an old-timer who knew how to handle such a sprawling film.

It's time to touch on something fundamental about Selznick... he was obsessed with Jennifer Jones.  He had insinuated his way into her fragile marriage to Robert Walker when they were all making Since You Went Away a year earlier.  Some say he stole her from the tragic Walker.  At the time of making Duel, Selznick was at the peak of frenzy.  He was going to turn her into the greatest actress of all-time or die trying.  If he only knew...

There were people who thought she was being forced on them and that Selznick may not have understood what she was and was not capable of.  He would not listen.  He couldn't apparently see that she was pathologically shy and insecure and as emotionally fragile as her about-to-be ex-husband.  What kind of horrible Hollywood creature would ask Bernadette to play Pearl?

Everything was Jennifer, Jennifer, Jennifer and make it bigger, bigger, bigger.  The great naysayers of Duel in the Sun found the film an insufferable behemoth that rams everything down an audience's throat to the point of nausea.  There were cries of it being a screaming Freudian fantasy, obsessed with sex (garnering the witty title of Lust in the Dust), racist, that it goes too far in every direction, its situations and characters are overwrought and blatantly obvious and the film is luridly colorful and overly-dramatically scored and that Jones and Peck are both miscast, even Cotten doesn't look like he's enjoying himself.

Ok, ok, I get it.  Well, some of it.  You want overwrought... some of those comments are overwrought.  What they're forgetting, perhaps, is the movie is terribly entertaining.  It held my attention for 2 hours and nine minutes.  It was also trying to let Gene Autry and Roy Rogers stay home while Duel and the same year's My Darling Clementine by John Ford were out to make westerns more cerebral and darker.  Why is that so wrong?  They could still go see Roy and Gene anytime.

There are some scenes that excited me... Jones's peril in riding bareback on a runaway horse with Peck chasing her on his trusted stallion against a backdrop of astonishing beauty and thundering music (ok, we all know it was done by doubles)... an exciting train wreck, Peck trying to tame a rather mad stallion... the grandeur of hundreds of horsemen riding over the countryside to stop the railroad... a lovely Disney-like sequence of Jones and Bickford walking and sharing sweet nuthins' among a pasture of mares and foals and Peck and Jones standing in silhouette against a giant orange sky (almost the entire screen is orange).

Selznick today would be shocked to see how his beloved Gone with the Wind is being raked over the coals for it careless racial slurs and attitudes.  Perhaps he'd hyperventilate to see that his Duel in the Sun should probably be in the group, too, although I think this is a dangerous practice of today to excoriate films this old with far different attitudes.  Nonetheless Barrymore's character says some vile things that made me wince when I first saw it in the early 60s.

Butterfly McQueen in her frequent nervous servant role will not go over well with some because a white man has written it this way and McQueen has again played this old stereotype.  I would personally rather concentrate on how much the actress cracks me up with that squeaky voice and with the funny things she says.  Has no one noticed she is probably the most decent character in the film?  Won't someone chat about that? 

Of course there's also the notion that a half-breed like Pearl is in need of being tamed by white society.  I suppose someone will have something to say about Jones donning a black wig and pounds of cheap bronzer to play the over-heated Pearl.  I am not aware of any Native American actresses in 1945-46 who could carry a big film like this.  Nonetheless I will not deny that this isn't a film with racist overtones... that would be silly as they're so obvious.  

There are those who say that Lewt raped Pearl that night before Jesse came into his brother's room the following morning.  I didn't necessarily leap to that conclusion because both characters play endless sexual games with one another and we actually see nothing except two horny people who want one another.  But Jesse apparently cut it off with Pearl because he felt that she must have been encouraging Lewt... whatever the circumstances.  

I do not think Jones and Peck were miscast as some reviewers have suggested.  Both, however, were playing roles that neither had really played before and I think they handled it well.  She was nominated for an Oscar.  Maybe the eyes flashed a little too much and the bare shoulders and flower in the hair is a little obvious but Selznick was determined his future wife was going to be the sexpot the part required. 

It was a difficult shoot for all because of the sheer size of making this film but it was especially difficult for Jones and Selznick and their spouses.  Everyone knew the marriages were ending but each couple was still living together with children and no one expected a relationship would develop and play out on News of the World.  

Jones was not like her character much at all.  I'd guess that she didn't understand such a woman and had to rely on feedback to get just the right nuances down pat.  Jones was so private and timid that it's a real head-scratcher to think she became an actress in the first place.  She was more than willing to let her new boss and boyfriend tell her how to handle the wild Pearl.

So imagine how difficult it would have been for Jones to not give Selznick (on the set bossing around the director and keeping an eye on Jones) exactly what he wanted. So in front of the crew he is yelling out to her... heave your breasts out... open your mouth... wet your lips... look as though you want it badly... make him beg... and well, you get the point.  Well, of course, with him being her lover in real life, what they were engaging in, while totally acceptable on a film set, might sound awfully personal in front of others.  She would not have handled it well.  He understands, too, but we must remember the goal... she is to become the best actress in the world.

I loved Peck in this role, so different for him.  Lewt is a lout, no question, but the actor amused with his easy manner.  Looking oh so handsome he is fun as a tease and scary with his sadism.  Lewt knew Pearl gave her heart to his brother but she gave her flesh to him.  His conceited response to that alternated between sexy and funny.

Jones and Peck became very good friends for life and would star together again in 1956 in The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. This was third of four pairings for Jones and Cotten and they were also good friends for life.  I thought he delivered his usual polished performance but who paid much attention when he had to compete with colorful characters like Pearl and Lewt.  Jones was so close to Bickford, her costar in The Song of Bernadette, that upon hearing of his death, she attempted suicide.

Barrymore and Gish (she was also Oscar-nominated) are also good in the type of roles that were very common for them.  He is so crabby and she is so pure.  The parents didn't see eye-to-eye and each of the sons was the carbon copy of one of the parents.  I loved how that was portrayed.  Seemed like home to me.

Huston plays a traveling preacher full of fire and brimstone who yells out about the Good Book and practically demands that Pearl becomes a lady.  I thought his part was unnecessary.  Carey plays the head railroad man with his typical authority.

The camerawork is nothing short of awe-inspiring.  This film can stand tall with other westerns that have been photographed so lushly.  To do it apparently took the talents of three cinematographers... Lee Garmes, Hal Rosson and Ray Rennham.  The dramatic, thundering music is done by none other than Dimitri Tiomkin.

The film's original roadshow opening had both a prelude and an overture with spoken words and exit music.  Big, big, big.

None other than director Martin Scorsese has said that Duel in the Sun is the first movie he ever remembers seeing and it had a profound influence on him.

Here's the trailer:

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A guilty pleasure