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DVD Duel in the Sun
Legendary producer David O. Selznick dreamed of another magnum opus like his 1939 production of Gone with the Wind; he also purposed to make Jennifer Jones, his ladylove and eventually second Mrs. Selznick, a megastar. Accordingly, he micromanaged the making of Duel in the Sun (Lust in the Dust to some), an extravagant Technicolor epic about the collision of the old West with the new, wide-open spaces with railroads and barbed wire, and hot-blooded outlaws with civilized folk, often wimpy or unwell. Beginning among giant rocks drenched in a blood-red sunset, with velvet-voiced Orson Welles intoning the leibestod legend of doomed Pearl Chavez and her demon lover, Duel never strays far from lush romanticism, spiced with a dash of S/M. Orphaned Pearl (Jones) comes to live at Spanish Bit Ranch, where frail Laura Belle McCanles (Lillian Gish) tries to make a lady of her, despite her questionable origins and insistent voluptuousness. Sexual license versus law--Pearl's choices--are symbolized by the McCanles brothers: dark, undisciplined Lewt (a lubriciously wicked Gregory Peck) and reasonable, forward-looking, repressed Jesse (Joseph Cotten). The cast is huge (Lionel Barrymore, Walter Huston, Harry Carey, Herbert Marshall, Charles Bickford, Butterfly McQueen) and there are unforgettable set pieces: summoned by a cacophony of bells, the gathering of McCanles cowboys from the four corners of the earth; Pearl in heat, clutching Lewt's leg and being dragged across the floor as he makes his getaway to Mexico; and the lovers' final shootout among those red rocks, as orgiastic a finale as you could ask for. --Kathleen Murphy
Reading some of these reviews makes one think DITS was a notch or two below Ed Wood. Yeah, the script is often trite and/or corny as well as unbelievable, and these is some miscasting or at least under-development of characters (Cotten, for example), but as a whole, the film is emminently watchable, simply for its sprawling saga-like tale. It's not a masterpiece of cinema by any means,but far from garbage. Yes, Peck and Jones go way over the top sometimes, and while Jones was not a great actress, she was far from talentless,as evidenced in some of her other films. And, truth be told, if you think about it objectively, her scenery-chewing sequences here aren't that much worse that Vivien Leigh's in Gone With The Wind. Yeah, it was a better film, but let's face it; Viv wasn't exactly below the rim the whole film either. Absolutely worth seeing.
Bigger than any other movie
--and a little bit hollow, too, for the filmmakers try to blow up an ordinary love triangle into a social and economic canvas the size of GONE WITH THE WIND, but it's just too small to fill that much space. However on all other fronts the film is magnificent and it is definitely one of the strangest pictures of the entire postwar period. The colors are rich, troubled, seething with pixels, and the musical score shouts and clamors what we all knew at heart, the west is another word for s-e-x. Selznick cleverly cast a number of silent film veterans in the cast, to trace the long history of melodrama in the movies, most notably Lillian Gish but also Lionel Barrymore, Harry Carey Sr and the incomparable Herbert Marshall, who plays Pearl's gambler father "Scott" during the first reel or two.
The younger generation, as represented by Cotten, Jones, and Peck, all visibly strain trying to be colorful, and in the case of Jones and Peck, they are rewarded with twin triumphs of overacting and sheer ham. Selznick must have sat Jennifer Jones down and force-fed her the complete filmic works of her predecessor, Maria Montez, to get her to be so over the top. As for Peck, the whole audience explodes with gasps and laughter when we hear him whistling, mournfully, "I've Been Working on the Railroad" after we see him blowing up an entire train just for the hell of it. In contrast, Cotten's a little flimsy and distracted in his part--he doesn't hold up his end of the triangle very well. Maybe Robert Walker would have been better, or Montgomery Clift, one of many to whom Selznick offered the part.
When I first saw DUEL IN THE SUN I was about fifteen and it blew me away. Contemporary films rarely feature the kind of soak-through Technicolor that Rosson and Garmes (and I guess von Sternberg, who worked on the film for many months) were able to produce here. The dancing (by Albertina "Tilly" Losch, the European answer to Martha Graham) is out of this world, and the oracular voice of Orson Welles blows the whole narrative into another dimension the minute his narration begins.
The 13th Birthday I Never Forgot
In 1979 I celebrated my 13th birthday staying up way too late watching "Duel In The Sun". It was an unbelievable evening as I was mesmerized with every second of this movie. Most young girls are hopeless romantics and I was certainly one of them. This movie will not disappoint if passion is what you're looking for. Unrequited love is almost a right of passage we all must endure and this movie always reminds me of the bittersweetness of that kind of love! I have not seen the movie since my Birthday 25 years ago. Decided to give myself a Christmas present and more than likely will pass this on to my daughter many years down the road. You won't be disappointed with this movie.
William Wyler directed this epic Western, about the clash of East and West, intellect and action. Gregory Peck stars as a sea captain who moves way out West to marry Carroll Baker and become part of the ranch owned by her father (Charles Bickford). But he discovers that daddy's top hand (Charlton Heston) carries a torch for Baker and doesn't particularly like Peck stepping into his place. Peck also finds himself caught in the midst of a power struggle between Bickford and his surly neighbor, Burl Ives (and his reprehensibly bullying son, Chuck Connors). This long, sprawling tale works because its characters are played by movie stars who know how to command the big screen in a big story. --Marshall FineMore Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gregory Peck - Jean Simmons Director(s): William Wyler DVD Release Date: Released the 20 March 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
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This silky smooth film noir pits gruff police detective Dana Andrews, stiff and blunt in his street-bred manners, against a cultured columnist and acidic wit (Clifton Webb at his prissiest) in a battle of wits during a murder investigation. The cop is a romantic hiding under a hard-boiled exterior who falls in love with the beautiful victim through the portrait that hangs in her apartment. Gene Tierney, whose heart-shaped face mixes the exotic with the girl next door, brings the poise and calm of a model to her role as the object of every man's gaze and the target of a killer. Laura, handsomely shot in dreamy black and white, is the first and best of Otto Preminger's cool, controlled murder mysteries. In the gritty world of film noir it remains the most refined and elegant example... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gene Tierney - Dana Andrews Director(s): Rouben Mamoulian - Otto Preminger DVD Release Date: Released the 15 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Leave Her to Heaven is one of the most unblinkingly perverse movies ever offered up as a prestige picture by a major studio in the golden age of Hollywood. Gene Tierney, whose lambent eyes, porcelain features, and sweep of healthy-American-girl hair customarily made her a 20th Century Fox icon of purity, scored an Oscar nomination playing a demonically obsessive daughter of privilege with her own monstrous notion of love. By the time she crosses eyebeams with popular novelist Cornel Wilde on a New Mexico-bound train, her jealous manipulations have driven her parents apart and her father to his grave. Well, no, not grave: Wilde soon gets to watch her gallop a glorious palomino across a red-rock horizon as she metronomically sows Dad's ashes to the winds. Mere screen moments later,... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gene Tierney - Cornel Wilde Director(s): John M. Stahl DVD Release Date: Released the 22 February 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Nineteen thirty-nine is often proposed as the movies' halcyon year, and three reasons why were directed by John Ford: Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln, and Drums Along the Mohawk. In that exalted company Drums... would have to be accounted "merely superb"--even if it's the best film ever made about the American Revolution and, oh, only about eighth-best picture of its year.
Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert play newlyweds in New York's Mohawk Valley at the time of the Revolutionary War. That war is more a distant rumor than a direct concern of people with cabins to raise, crops to harvest, and firstborn on the way. When it comes to their valley, in the form of hitherto-peaceable Indians whipped up by a gaunt Tory with an eyepatch (John Carradine), life changes... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Claudette Colbert - Henry Fonda - Edna May Oliver Director(s): John Ford DVD Release Date: Released the 24 May 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Did any man ever love a woman the way Selznick loved Jennifer Jones? Movie after movie he produced as a testament to her beauty and his inflated opinion of her talent. Back in the day, people scoffed, but looking at the movies now, for the most part, Jones meets or exceeds Selznick's expectations. She really could do almost anything, and even if she couldn't she gave it her best shot. We admire her for being game, if nothing else, though this enthusiasm leads sometimes to tastelessness, such as her impersonation of Eurasian Lin Yutang in LOVE IS A MANY SPLENDORED THING, or trying to imitate a young teen girl in this film, PORTRAIT OF JENNIE, a sensitive attempt but one doomed to failure, she just comes off as a little nutty and Joseph Cotten's interest in her a little prurient.
More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Jennifer Jones - Joseph Cotten Director(s): William Dieterle DVD Release Date: Released the 19 October 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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