dual personalities

In my ongoing search for something to watch, I spent two hours viewing Duel in the Sun (1946) the other night. It was a more enjoyable melodrama than last week’s Suddenly Last Summer, but really, once again, the over-acting and the sexual turmoil became almost comic.

The story goes that producer David O. Selznick wanted to top the great success of Gone With the Wind (1939) and he let out all the stops on Duel in the Sun. The script is attributed to Selznick himself, “suggested” by a novel by Niven Busch, but he couldn’t leave the script alone and kept revising it as the movie was shot. There is even a “preface” which is narrated by none other than Orson Welles. The lurid technicolor and the overblown score by Dimitri Tiomkin contribute to the mess, but they also make it more watchable. I found myself humming the main theme days afterwards.

There are a lot of stars in the movie, led by the producer’s wife, Jennifer Jones, who chews the scenery with aplomb as an orphaned halfbreed who experiences prejudice and forbidden love while living with her white relatives on a large ranch in Texas. Joseph Cotton plays the “good” (boring) older brother and Gregory Peck plays the “bad” (exciting) younger brother. Lionel Barrymore plays their crippled, racist, cattle baron father and Lillian Gish is his long-suffering, southern belle wife. Walter Huston plays a wild-eyed preacher. Really there are no likable characters in this story and that is the main problem. People are either weak in a bad way or strong in a bad way. The only mediating character is played with some subtlety by Harry Carey. His part is minor and appears to have been mostly cut. I’m not sure who “Lem Smoot” actually was. He seems out of place in this emotional mish-mosh.

I remember seeing this movie as a child and being moved by it, probably because I had no idea what was actually going on and the music was exciting. I can’t say I really understood what was always going on now 60 years later. Interestingly, it is the first movie Martin Scorsese saw as a child and it had a great impact on him at the time as well. I wonder what the twins would make of it?

Well, you win some, you lose some. Back to the drawing board. Any ideas?

*Walter Huston as “Jubal Crabbe, the Sinkiller”