It is common for people to say that DUEL IN THE SUN was an attempt (one of several) for David Selznick to repeat his greatest production success in Hollywood. He had produced GONE WITH THE WIND, and tried repeatedly to duplicate it. It was impossible. I feel the closes he got was with SINCE YOU WENT AWAY, which is still a very moving film showing the alterations World War II caused on the home front. But his films with Hitchcock (including REBECCA and SUSPICION and NOTORIOUS and SPELLBOUND) and DUEL IN THE SUN and A FAREWELL TO ARMS all fall short. This does not mean the films are negligible. Most of the Hitchcock-Selznick partnership films are damned good, and one finds even A FAREWELL TO ARMS worth watching. But GONE WITH THE WIND, despite the stereotypes Margaret Mitchell put into it, showed the collapse of a whole way of life in this country a century earlier due to the Civil War. It can't be reproduced in a western - the west was an entirely different problem of survival in a hostile atmosphere - not one that had built up a set of institutions (unfortunately including slavery) and traditions that were just destroyed.
Still DUEL IN THE SUN tries hard, and succeeds to some extent. The story is one of racism in 19th Century Texas. The McCandless Family (Lionel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, Joseph Cotton, and Gregory Peck) are Texas royalty (in a sense) with a huge estate. It is supposed to be the equivalent of Tara in GONE WITH THE WIND. Into their world comes Lillian's cousin, Jennifer Jones, whose father was Mexican (the father was Herbert Marshall). Marshall kills his wife and her lover at the start of the film, and is hanged (his execution scene is very moving actually, as he willingly accepts his death but regrets the loss of his contact with his daughter). Barrymore hates the girl - she is part Mexican and part Indian (he refers to her as "Pocahontas" at one point), and he hates her dead father, who may have had an affair with Gish. Barrymore favors his son Peck over the more civilized Cotton, and the latter is aware of this. Peck is quite charismatic, but he is also quite a murderous type. Luke McCandless was the wickedness villain Peck played prior to the film THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL thirty years later.
Jones' Pearl Chavez is also wicked in her ways, using her attractiveness to destroy men (Cotton and Peck are both interested in her, as is Charles Bickford). She likes Cotton, but her inner sense realizes that she and Peck are very much the same, and she wishes to win him. But Peck is too uncontrollable, and he and Jones rarely get their chemistry together properly.
There are some good moments: the death of Gish, when she confronts Barrymore on her death bed and the wind and rain push her porch rocking chair back and forth as she leaves this world. Or when Peck destroys a railroad track with dynamite, and starts humming, "I've Been Working On The Railroad"!
The film got the nickname (since taken by a comedy that starred Divine and Tab Hunter back in the 1980s) of LUST IN THE DUST. This was due to the odd conclusion of the film. 1946/47 was a year where twice men and women killed each other in films. Orson Welles (who narrates the start of this film) would direct THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI the following year, wherein Rita Hayward and Everett Sloane shoot each other in a crazy house hall of mirrors. But they really hated each other in that film. Here a desperate Jones shoots Peck to prevent him from killing Cotton, and he returns the favor. Both bleeding to death from multiple wounds they crawl to each other and die in a final embrace. The mutual shooting has been subject to much interpretation. My guess is that the two characters were just so super-sexed that it was impossible to imagine them riding off together into married bliss. Possibly they just had to destroy each other - certainly nobody else could have satisfied their desires. Whatever the reason, it was the final reason that the film remains so memorable to this day.
Still DUEL IN THE SUN tries hard, and succeeds to some extent. The story is one of racism in 19th Century Texas. The McCandless Family (Lionel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, Joseph Cotton, and Gregory Peck) are Texas royalty (in a sense) with a huge estate. It is supposed to be the equivalent of Tara in GONE WITH THE WIND. Into their world comes Lillian's cousin, Jennifer Jones, whose father was Mexican (the father was Herbert Marshall). Marshall kills his wife and her lover at the start of the film, and is hanged (his execution scene is very moving actually, as he willingly accepts his death but regrets the loss of his contact with his daughter). Barrymore hates the girl - she is part Mexican and part Indian (he refers to her as "Pocahontas" at one point), and he hates her dead father, who may have had an affair with Gish. Barrymore favors his son Peck over the more civilized Cotton, and the latter is aware of this. Peck is quite charismatic, but he is also quite a murderous type. Luke McCandless was the wickedness villain Peck played prior to the film THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL thirty years later.
Jones' Pearl Chavez is also wicked in her ways, using her attractiveness to destroy men (Cotton and Peck are both interested in her, as is Charles Bickford). She likes Cotton, but her inner sense realizes that she and Peck are very much the same, and she wishes to win him. But Peck is too uncontrollable, and he and Jones rarely get their chemistry together properly.
There are some good moments: the death of Gish, when she confronts Barrymore on her death bed and the wind and rain push her porch rocking chair back and forth as she leaves this world. Or when Peck destroys a railroad track with dynamite, and starts humming, "I've Been Working On The Railroad"!
The film got the nickname (since taken by a comedy that starred Divine and Tab Hunter back in the 1980s) of LUST IN THE DUST. This was due to the odd conclusion of the film. 1946/47 was a year where twice men and women killed each other in films. Orson Welles (who narrates the start of this film) would direct THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI the following year, wherein Rita Hayward and Everett Sloane shoot each other in a crazy house hall of mirrors. But they really hated each other in that film. Here a desperate Jones shoots Peck to prevent him from killing Cotton, and he returns the favor. Both bleeding to death from multiple wounds they crawl to each other and die in a final embrace. The mutual shooting has been subject to much interpretation. My guess is that the two characters were just so super-sexed that it was impossible to imagine them riding off together into married bliss. Possibly they just had to destroy each other - certainly nobody else could have satisfied their desires. Whatever the reason, it was the final reason that the film remains so memorable to this day.