“Duel in the Sun” is a blustering mess of a film that is product of something that should never exist: Producer Auteurism. 

That said.... only one of the most legendary producers in Hollywood history could make such a bombastic blowhard of a movie. And for that — “Duel” is essential viewing. 

David O. Selznick intended for “Duel,” originally titled “Lust in the Dust,” to replicate the romantic steaminess of his hit “Gone with the Wind.” Only this time - the desert setting would take the heat up to levels no human should be forced to withstand. 

Despite “Duel” exerting embarrassing levels of feral thirst, it also has a humiliating excess of pomposity. 

It takes a full ten minutes for “Duel”…

Wow, wow, wow. Wow. Wow? Wow.

This is one of the most ridiculous films I've ever seen. Every character and scene is hilariously over the top, hardly any of the plot or character motivations make any sense at all. The entire film seems to take place at sunset (or during a thunderstorm). It's deeply offensive in so many ways. I loved every second of it!

I'm not sure whether my favourite character was Gregory Peck, playing against type as a sexy bad-boy, Walter Huston as a vicar who never stops shouting about Beelzebub, the extremely talented horse, or Butterfly McQueen. But even the characters I didn't 100% love had five-star moments - Joseph Cotten blowing smoke rings; Charles Bickford trying…

"(This pendant) will keep me sweet and clean as milk."
"Who cares about milk? I don't want no... milkmaid!"

*"that was a zinger!" music starts playing*

Oh fuck me.

I've never been so pumped up by opening credits. Vidor! Peck! Huston! Selznick! Tiomkin! Gish! Cotten! When I found this in the library I gasped with delight. Oh what a fool I was. What a waste of money and technicolor film. Every single scene of this film has at least two things to severely dislike.

I'm not joking.

Every single scene in this 145 minute epic. Many contain way more.

There's a scene toward the middle where Jones undergoes some terrible "transformative moment" and gives a series of facial expressions that…

the heights of technical splendor that could be achieved by old hollywood, the lows of producer-controlled mania and incoherent style -- duel in the sun exists in such contradictions.

a four-color melodrama wearing the empty skin of a western, duel belongs first to the heritage of the 'directed-by-committee' approach to filmmaking during the 'golden age' of the studio system; whereas studios like MGM and warner bros. had an entire army of producers, writers, and technicians working on each picture, david o. selznick was the tyrannical maestro dictating every, single, part of gone with the wind, rebecca, and lastly duel. should a non-director ever have that much creative control over a film? it's not even a real question, the answer is…

"It don't seem possible, but I must have been wrong about a whole lot of things."

Once upon a time, there was a little boy named David who was rich and semi-famous, but he longed to be richer and famouser. Then one day his secretary alerted him to the story of Miss Scarlett, Miss Melanie, Mammy, and Prissy. She thought it would make a swell picture. So David gathered unto him his yes-men, who, of course, said yes, and David assembled around a million writers and directors to create his dream. When the multitudes saw the result, they thought it was a swell picture, and David was richer and famouser.

But David was restless and wanted to create another picture…

A failed attempt to replicate the mega-success of Gone With the Wind, this has David O. Selznick's psychosis all over it. If Spellbound was his kitsch attempt to popularise Freud, this is America's sexual and racial hysteria as Jungian myth. It's ridiculously miscast, featuring his usual favourites. Handsome, vacant plank Gregory Peck doesn't convince as an intense Robert Ryan/ Glenn Ford bad boy. Joseph Cotten is too knowing and worldly-wise to play naive good boy too. Poor old Jennifer Jones once again looks press-ganged by hubby, into a role she knows she's not suited for.

Yet somehow, it's weirdly spellbinding. Selznick had some of Hollywood's best directors working under his heel, but here met his match with that other crank…

8th King Vidor (after Our Daily Bread, The Fountainhead, The Big Parade, Beyond the Forest, The Patsy, An American Romance and Truth and Illusion: An Introduction to Metaphysics)

Starts in astonishingly ropy fashion, largely because Jennifer Jones is astonishingly bad. Good at playing naive waifs, she's exceptionally awful at anything else and that's not even figuring for the thick smear of "tanning" makeup meant to signify her Mestiza ancestry. She's not quite as offensive as Butterfly McQueen's Vashti but it's pretty damned close. I can only assume that her exaggerated sneers and schoolgirl attempts at glowers were nominated for an Oscar because Selznick, the megalomaniac, bullied the Academy. It might be the least deserving nom I've yet seen, but there's performances…

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Para alguém que se gaba de conhecer tão bem o cinema americano, o que é espantoso no Tarantino é o quanto ele não entende, a se julgar pelos seus filmes, uma coisa elementar que o western conseguiu fazer desde pelo menos The Iron Horse, em 1924 (na realidade isso data desde pelo menos Griffith), e que Tarantino por sua vez não conseguiu fazer em nenhum dos seus filmes históricos (talvez em OUATIH; a rever), e menos ainda nos dois westerns: a História só deixa de ser um reles material narrativo para se tornar um campo de exploração (como nos anacrônicos que mencionei na segunda nota) ou um tema de reflexão (como em Ford, Mizoguchi, Cimino, Milius, uma parte…