7:00 p.m.	Duel in the Sun King Vidor (USA,1947)

Duel in the Sun is “the tale of a sunblistered romance involving a half-breed Indian girl and two dagger-eyed Texas brothers, one of them very good and the other very bad” (Bosley Crowther, N.Y. Times).
“Duel in the Sun is a film of endless fascination. Volumes could be written on the color effects alone and the respective contributions thereto of William Cameron Menzies, Ray Rennahan, Josef von Sternberg, and two Sternberg associates from his golden period--Hal Rosson and Lee Garmes. And we will probably never know for sure just how much of the film was directed by Vidor, Sternberg, William Dieterle, Otto Brower, or David O. Selznick. Duel has become a film even more legendary than the love affair between Pearl and Lewt it celebrates... For its audacity and ambition, if for nothing else, Duel can claim to be the Birth of a Nation of color westerns, the father of She Wore A Yellow Ribbon and The Searchers... Because of its almost operatic grandiosity it is hard to feel very much for the protagonists of Duel in the Sun with the outstanding exception of Lillian Gish. Miss Gish’s performance is as moving as the one she gave for Vidor two decades before in La Boheme, and her death scene is as sensitive and lovely as the earlier, similar one in that film... When Gish dies, Vidor moves away to her rocker, animated by the wind and rain, the same effect the young director had used in his experimental Wild Oranges a quarter-century before. But Miss Lillian is really not dead. For when Pearl Chavez rides out to kill Lewt, she is uncannily transformed into a phantasm of a young resolute Lillian Gish, Mrs. McCanless thus killing the son she despises via the daughter she never had. This is perhaps the most outrageous conceit of an entirely outrageous movie, and it is brilliant. As Andrew Sarris has said: ‘In cinema, as in all art, only those who risk the ridiculous have a real shot at the sublime.’ In Duel in the Sun, an older, less hopeful, but still enterprising King Vidor came damn close to the bullseye.” --Charles Silver


• • Produced by David O. Selznick. Directed by King Vidor. Written by David O. Selznick, suggested by a novel by Niven Busch, adapted by Oliver H.P. Garret. Photographed by Lee Garmes, Hal Rosson, Ray Rennahan. Music written and conducted by Dimitri Tiomkin. Color consultant: Josef von Sternberg. With Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotton, Gregory Peck, Lionel Barrymore, Herbert Marshall, Lillian Gish, Walter Huston. (1947, 125 mins, color, Print from Films Inc.)