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Duel in the Sun Movie Review

Duel in the Sun is a 1946 western romance film directed by King Vidor and starring Jennifer Jones, Gregory Peck and Joseph Cotton. It’s an overly bombastic movie.

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“Under that heathen blanket,

there’s a full-blossomed woman

built by the devil to drive men crazy“

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Beautiful, biracial Pearl Chavez becomes the ward of her dead father’s first love and finds herself torn between two brothers, one good and the other bad. David O. Selznick is the producer of this movie and he clearly wanted to have another ‘Gone with the Wind’ with this picture as the toxic romance and lavish vistas try to mirror that iconic masterpiece.

However, he is also a writer on the movie and it was a terrible idea for a producer to write a screenplay, resulting in a very poor script that the movie never managed to recover from. The concept itself was a strong one. I am all in for westerns to focus on romantic storylines first and foremost. That mixture has always appealed to me. And the choice to finally deal with an interracial relationship in the Old West between a white man and a girl with Native American ancestry was a terrific one.

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Unfortunately, the execution was quite mediocre. The biggest problem was the acting. Poor Joseph Cotton did the best that he could with an underwritten role and surrounded by actors that overacted the hell out of their roles. Gregory Peck was at first solid, but later he was ludicrously theatrical, especially in that final sequence where I laughed out loud how cringe-worthy his line delivery was. He was again cast as a villain here, which just doesn’t fit him.

But Jennifer Jones was also not that great herself. Why the Academy decided to honor her with a nomination is beyond me. The same goes for Lillian Gish, who wasn’t all that memorable in a less important role. Jones’ Pearl Chavez is an intriguing character and the same goes Peck’s Lewton character. The psychosexual nature of their complex relationship is somewhat well explored here and it was even emotionally potent in certain moments, but the actors ruined these roles for me unfortunately.

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Duel in the Sun is also way too bombastic for its own sake. This is a film that tried so desperately to be an epic, timeless masterpiece, but it mostly reeked of desperation than it was truly epic. Yes, the cinematography is gorgeous. The landscapes are stunning, the sweeping vistas are beautiful and the movie is also powerfully scored. But it’s also too loud at times and too weakly edited and directed, which was odd as King Vidor was usually a phenomenal director, but he just couldn’t save the weak material that he was given here. The movie is quite enjoyable at times due to those visuals and an interesting central relationship, but it was too messy overall.