Duel in the Sun

It's the lavish, ambitious, undeniably commercial, yet uncomfortably strange Hollywood films that get under my skin the most. In the last week of movie binging, no film has haunted me more than Duel in the Sun (1946) . It's a David O. Selznick (who sheparded Gone with the Wind) produced Western, with his obsession and lover, Jennifer Jones trying to play Pearl, a half-breed Mexican and Gregory Peck as the villain.
The movie definitley works as great camp: Butterfly "I don't know nothing about birthing no babies" McQueen once again plays a comic servant, Vashti, and Lionel Barrymore is hilarious as the delusional patriarch.

Yet Duel in the Sun is still unsettling. Jones' abrupt shifts from vengeful, reformed lady to an uncontrollable, strangely primitive love for Peck, the man who ruins her, is disturbing and poignant. The opening narration from Orson Welles, andthe film's bright red technicolor are also surreal.

It's wonderful melodrama. The western genre's archetypes and typical struggles are modified. Pearl is the outsider, but she's not called upon to save her family's ranch, and the conflict between civilization and savagery is internal, not external. Plus, it's shorter and by far more entertaining than Gone with the Wind.