Duel In The Sun Details

Pull up an armchair for a wonderful wallow in one of the wackiest melodramas ever made. Producer David O Selznick intended this costly production to be the equal of his Gone with the Wind. What he ended up with was a lurid western that, in its day, managed to offend church leaders and censorship boards alike. (Unsurprisingly, it became a massive box office hit. — second only to The Best Years of Our Lives in the box-office tally for the entire decade) Jennifer Jones stars as mixed-race Pearl Chavez and Gregory Peck plays lewd Lewt McCanles — roles that must surely have embarrassed them in hindsight. The infamous finale is simultaneously ludicrous and stunning, as Jones and Peck, both dying, orgasmically crawl towards each other as the desert sun blazes down. (It was this that led audiences to refer to the movie as Lust in the Dust.) Dimitri Tiomkin's score is splendid, and the use of Technicolor is especially striking: on a big screen in a good print, this is one of the best films ever made with that colour process. Although credited to director King Vidor, many cooks baked this pie, including William Dieterle and Dietrich's mentor Josef von Sternberg. As sexy, exciting and stupid as Hollywood gets, this is a real one-off, full of many pleasures if you throw away your mind.

Massive Western, dominated and fragmented by its producer, who bought the best talent and proceeded to interfere with it, so that while individual scenes are marvellous, the narrative has little flow. The final gory shoot-up between two lovers was much di