To all that had already gone with the wind, David Selznick and King Vidor granted one last decadent tribute, a tragic, incendiary resurgence. Pearl Chavez is a cultural trauma, as Jean-Louis Comolli wrote, the forbidden fruit of confused times, daughter of a fallen Creole dandy and an untamed Native woman; the wounded lion Lionel Barrymore, a Texas rancher unwilling to see his land scarred by the railroad, finally bows before the flag “I fought for”. So he was on the right side after all – and yet today he fears “migrants, politics, and taxes”, the same angry resentments, the same timeless, miserable dreads. There is much American history in Duel in the Sun, starting with the cynical resilience of the racial stereotype – including the little black maid played by Butterfly McQueen, still the chatty airhead who got slapped by Scarlett O’Hara. But if we are here speaking of the film with the reverence owed to a myth, it’s because this is above all a story of bodies ablaze with desire, an almost unreachable peak of Hollywood erotica. A story of secretions magnifiques: tears, sweat, blood, saliva and others we can’t help but imagine. Vidor, who had to leave the directing of the hot stuff to Selznick, was annoyed: “I saw those kisses in the editing room, they made me laugh.” And yet, years later, he would make that boundless surge of passion completely his own, in the masterpiece Ruby Gentry. Because clearly, any woman with her hormones in check would have preferred the ironic lawyer Joseph Cotten to Gregory Peck’s lewd smiles and dancing spurs – a bully, a killer, and a “semi-rapist”, per se a nonsensical word. But that’s exactly what’s at stake here, that’s the dark pit Jennifer Jones explores, while walking the taut line between desire and its rhetoric, a wonderful creature, surrealist and hypnotic. Duel in the Sun is a living rhizome, capable of resurfacing after great stretches of time: a strikingly Oedipal and erotic western series such as Yellowstone, where the domineering father brands cattle “like he does with his sons”, is its most recent and swollen offshoot. But let us return to the original, and allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by Dimitri Tiomkin’s inescapable music, by Lee Garmes’ hellish sunsets, in the beauty of restored Technicolor.

Paola Cristalli