Duel in the Sun
Short description
Duel in the Sun follows Pearl Chavez, the daughter of a man condemned to death for killing his wife. Before his execution he sends the girl to live with Laura Belle McCanles, an old friend of his, on a large Texas ranch. There Pearl meets the family's two grown sons: Jesse, a well-mannered lawyer, and Lewt, a reckless, impulsive cowboy. Both are drawn to her, but the two brothers could hardly be more different, and Pearl's position between them turns into an open conflict that pulls the household apart.
King Vidor directed the film, which sits between Northwest Passage and The Fountainhead in a career that had begun with The Big Parade in 1925 and would continue through Man Without a Star, War and Peace and Solomon and Sheba. David O. Selznick produced and wrote the screenplay with Ben Hecht, and the large credited cast is headed by Jennifer Jones as Pearl, Joseph Cotten as Jesse, Gregory Peck as Lewt, Lionel Barrymore as Senator Jackson McCanles, Herbert Marshall as Scott Chavez and Lillian Gish as Laura Belle.
Released at the end of 1946, the film runs 144 minutes and was an expensive production, made for about six million dollars and earning roughly twenty million worldwide. On IMDb it holds 6.7 from around 10,000 votes, while on TMDB it has 6.4 from about 200. A critics' rating of 6.4 from 24 reviews places it close to the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- The full version of the film has a runtime of 144 minutes.
- During the filming of the scene where her character crawls over the rocks, actress Jennifer Jones (1919-2009) scraped her skin everywhere she possibly could.
- David O. Selznick (1902-1965) initially thought everything would be as it was when working on “Gone with the Wind” (1939) by Victor Fleming (1889-1949), George Cukor (1899-1983) and Sam Wood (1883-1949) – that it would be a grand project with no expense spared, and it eventually turned out that way. Constant delays in filming – many of which were caused by Selznick constantly interfering with the production process and frequently hiring and firing directors (there were seven in total, including Selznick himself) – as well as a painfully long editing period (as the film initially ran for 26 hours) drove up the production costs to an unprecedented $6 million for the time, plus another $2 million for marketing. The film eventually recouped its costs, but marked the beginning of the decline of Selznick's career.
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