Review of Duel in the Sun (1946) by Greg B — 14 Jul 2008

If it ended three minutes earlier, you would have had me.

This is the second Western in a row that would have been awesome except for the cop-out happy-esque ending. I have to say that this is the first David O. Selznick movie that kind of let me down. You can tell that he's just getting off the mentality of Gone With the Wind at the time because this movie desperately trying to be Gone with the Wind, only in the West. The big draw away from this movie is the even weaker depiction of Scarlett O'Hara in this one. I have always known Selznick to make seemingly weak women come about in a flip-flopping romance only to turn around at the end and become a strong independent woman of the world. Yeah, too bad that this movie got a lot of that flip-floppy, weak-woman stuff only to make me encouraged for the strong woman stuff ONLY TO BRING ON THE WEAK WOMAN AGAIN AT THE END.

But Selznick can't do anything small or contained. Like all of his movies, this movie is really epic in scope. While the entire reason that the Hollywood Western was so popular at the time because they were so cheap to make, this movie does the exact opposite. This movie has hundreds of extras, all doing tricks on horses and sporting guns. I know that King Vidor got everything he wanted out of this movie because he couldn't have fit anything else on the screen. Honestly, Selznick just waited for problems to show up and he must have thrown money all over it. Although I did groan when I found out it was a Selznick movie. As much as I love his other films, the run-times on his movies are always way too long and this movie is no exception. The movie started with a prelude and then continued into an overture.

The really enjoyable part of this movie, however, was Gregory Peck. Peck has always been some variation of Atticus Finch for me. He's always been that pillar of morality and to see him as a rough-and-tumble nogoodnik is just completely alienating for me. I kept expecting the character to have a change of heart and become the heart of the family. Instead, the character just became more and more dastardly. But Peck is great in this part, as he is with all parts. He takes that level of cruelty to new heights and just becomes one of the most exploitive main characters I've ever seen in a movie. There's absolutely nothing redeeming about the man. He is a racist ol' coot who is molded by his father. But that's where the story gets really interesting.

The best story element comes in the form of the Senator / Father character. He is the reason that all these characters are in the mess they are in and is too racist and domineering to realize it is him. He has this great moment on the hill when one of his sons is dying that just sums up the character so perfectly. While I may plenty of qualms with the A-story, there's a lot of great things that are going on with the B-story that I really admire. It's stuff we've seen in movies before, let alone in Westerns, but this movie really has that character be truly despicable and hated.

It's got good stuff going for it, but the movie as a whole is not all that great. I just found myself going "blah" having to sit through two-and-a-half hours of a woman not sticking up for herself. This wouldn't be such a problem if I didn't see a lot of these themes in Gone with the Wind. It might be worth a watch, but be ready for some real tedium in this movie.