Duel in the Sun

David O. Selznick tries to replicate the success of Gone With the Wind with sweetheart Jennifer Jones and a Western setting. The result is this hideously overproduced, feverishly over-the-top and laughably bad film, which does little more than sully the names of those involved. If it weren't for Mackenna's Gold, this might well be the worst big-budget Western ever made.

Pearl Chavez (Jennifer Jones) is a half-breed girl who goes to live with her distant relatives, the powerful but crippled Senator McCanless (Lionel Barrymore) and his sweet wife Lulubelle (Lillian Gish), after her father kills her cheating mother in a jealous rage. She finds herself attracted to Lewt (Gregory Peck), the Senator's no-good, rotten son, and the straight-laced Jessie (Joseph Cotten). Pearl is ostensibly torn between the two men, while trying to become a respectable member of society. Meanwhile, McCanless declares war on an encroaching railroad, and his family is torn apart as Lewt and Jessie take separate sides in the conflict.

Duel in the Sun is often touted as a "camp classic," but that's being kind. The hysterically bad finale might qualify for this label, but most of the film is just bloated, dull and aggressively mediocre. The astonishing production values, including gorgeous Technicolor photography (the studio-lit sunsets are otherworldly) and James Basevi's ravishing set designs, merely highlight greater flaws: for all the effort put into making the film look good, zero effort seems put into making it make sense. In this regard, Duel is just as offensive and empty as certain modern blockbusters.

The domineering Selznick went through seven directors, including such luminaries as King Vidor, Joseph Von Sternberg and William Dieterle, and it shows. The plot is disjointed, unfocused and all over the damned place, not making a lick of sense; the various plot strands go out on their own, creating a confused muddle weighed down with cliches. Individual scenes are excellent - the sprawling bar in the opening scene, a showdown between McCandless's hired guns and the US Cavalry - but none of it comes together to anything coherent. Selznick's epic pretensions are left in the dust as the story wanders and characters screw, slap and shoot each other without motivation. Selznick had similar issues on Gone With the Wind, but still managed to pull a mostly good film together. Here, they add up to epic failure.

Characterization is another area in which the film fails. Pearl is a schizophrenic protagonist, a fallen woman seeking redemption in one scene, an eloping, lusty slut the next. These changes in character occur at the drop of the hat, hardly conducive to our sympathizing with Pearl. The rest of the cast are one-note, cartoonish stereotypes: the vile, lusty Lewt, the straight-laced Jessie, the tyrannical Senator, the virtuous Lulubelle. Along with the cliched story, the other-worldly photography and campy violence, this makes for a heaping pile of lurid melodrama, with the depth and originality of a dime-store romance novel.

In fairness, the finale is so hysterically bad that it deserves special mention. Pearl and Lewt confront each other in a canyon and blast away at each other, crying out each other's name, crawling across the desert and embracing as they die. It's a fitting epitaph to the film, a nonsensical, feverish mess that can't make up its damned mind. This hilarious scene rivals the fight in Rasputin and the Empress as the most ludicrous scene in Classic Hollywood, and is the one marginally-interesting part of the film.

Jennifer Jones puts her all into her role, but she hasn't a chance with her hopelessly schizophrenic character. Gregory Peck is badly miscast as a leering bad boy: his other collaborations with Selznick (on Hitchcock's Spellbound and The Paradine Case) are little better. Joseph Cotten tends to be either really good or really bland, and he's definitely the latter here. Lionel Barrymore (Rasputin and the Empress) and Walter Huston (The Furies) chew scenery like it's going out of style, and Butterfly McQueen plays a re-run of Gone With the Wind's Prissy. Perhaps the one bright spot is silent star Lillian Gish, who gives her part a dignified, tragic gravitas lacking from the rest of the film.

Duel in the Sun is the Transformers of its day: for all it's impressive production values, it's still a monumentally stupid piece of drek. Selznick was so concerned with everything being big that being good was of little concern. Sadly, it seems Hollywood learned the wrong lesson from this film.