Year of Release: 1946Country of Origin: USA
Director: King Vidor
Cast: Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, Gregory Peck, Lionel Barrymore
Plot outline: Half-breed Pearl Chavez goes to live with her Anglo relatives, becoming involved in prejudice and forbidden love (IMDb).
Despite all his flashy exploitation, the producer Selznick can't hide the fact that this multimillion-dollar Western is a spectacularly disappointing job. Those are harsh words for a movie upon which the producer of some memorably fine movies 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"?) compels their use. Reduced to its bare essentials and cleared of a clutter of clichés worn thin in a hundred previous Westerns, 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 Selznick, who wrote it from a novel by Niven Busch, 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. The performances are strangely uneven - all of them. The best and the most consistent is that of Gregory Peck, who makes of the renegade brother a credibly vicious and lawless character. The next best is that of Walter Huston as a frontier evangelist. As the desert flower, cause of all the turmoil, Jennifer 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. Likewise, Lionel Barrymore and Lillian Gish 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, 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. (NYT)
My judgement: ** out of 4 stars
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