very worth watching just for the technicolor/cinematography, the orange, studio-lit skies and the sets (especially the cantina in the movie's opening moments).
Duel in the Sun - 4/10 - Jesus Christ. As one might expect from Selznick and King Vidor, this is certainly a lavish production: gorgeous location shooting in Technicolor, with some studio-lighted dusk scenes that are out of this world, great art direction, nice if bombastic score by Mr. Tiomkin - production-wise, everything is top-notch. And there are a handful of scenes that are good-to-great, like the opening and the cavalry's showdown with Barrymore and Company. But for God's sakes, everything else that matters sucks. You have a disjointed, feverishly melodramatic story that makes not a wit of sense, an unlikeable heroine who completely shifts personality from one scene to the next, an awful script, cartoonish characters and no pretense to subtlety or narrative cohesion. Most of it is just boring and aggressively mediocre until the finale, which for my money is one of the most ludicrous scenes in big-budget movie history, close behind the fight scene in Rasputin and the Empress. There's some possible influence on later directors - the dynastic squabbles a la Anthony Mann, some elements which may have inspired OUATITW - but these aren't alone worth much. Jennifer Jones is awful; Gregory Peck is badly miscast; Joseph Cotten is at his most colorless; Lionel Barrymore and Walter Huston chew scenery with reckless abandon. The more I think about it, the more a 4 may be excessively generous.
Never seen it, but it's featured in Michael Sauter's The Worst Movies of All Time, so . . .
Jones's makeup is awful; she looks like a clown. Giving a a white girl a mudbath doesn't make her a half-breed. Why do Westerns so often do that with American actors who are supposed to be Indians/Mexicans/half-breeds? Can't they use an actress who actually has darker skin? Especially when Jones stands next to other white people in the movie, it looks so bad, it's comical.
I hear ya. On the other hand, sometimes this approach pays off. Have you ever seen Jean Simmons in Black Narcissus? That was a case of using make-up to turn a white girl brown (she's supposed to be a girl native of India) and it really, really works. Of course, the Archers were responsible for that, not Hollywood, and maybe only they, at the time, could pull it off.
Well, it is Jean Simmons...
Not sure I get you. I've never thought of Ms. Simmons as being particularly swarthy otherwise. Just the opposite, in fact.