by Lynn Haney
Jones was desperately unhappy and almost certainly feeling guilty over the breakup of her marriage to actor Robert Walker. The two had met at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. In love and excited about their career, they married in 1939 and together headed for Hollywood, where Jones began her screen career that same year playing leads in minor action films. She attracted the attention of David O Selznick who signed her to a long-term contract and groomed her for stardom. Robert Walker staged a modest ascent as the boy-next-door type of leading man with an ingratiating smile in such productions as See Here Private Hargrove (1944) and The Clock (1945). Selznick’s determination to possess Jones broke up her marriage and exacerbated Walker’s deeply rooted mental problems.
Partly because the script was being rewritten on a daily basis by Selznick and partly because the censors were eager to see it, people from the Breen office (the production code administration) had to be on the set. Selznick was continually at loggerheads with them, causing a slowdown in production. Their script concerns included costuming (too much exposure of breasts), kissing, positioning (get Pearl off the bed), and incest. The dialogue also distressed the censors. Orders came back to omit lines such as ‘I get that kind of service from my studs’ and ‘I want to lie where you are softest.’ Much of Walter Huston’s praying as the Sin Killer was cut after protests against his parody of prayer. Jennifer Jones had taken dancing lessons and performed a sexy dance by the sump, but the censors insisted it be cut. Editors were hired to remove the sump dance from over 300 plates – and have every outtake burned. As Greg recalls, the film was certainly tame by today’s standards: ‘We’d imply that hanky-panky was going on, but we didn’t show it.’
In the midst of production, a strike was called at the studio. As a result of this dispute, Selznick suspended work on Duel in the Sun. So Greg traveled to Florida and went to work on The Yearling, making all its exterior shots. Among a cast of illustrious players – Lionel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, Joseph Cotton, Walter Huston – Greg was the only one to keep on working. As soon as the strike was over, Greg jumped back into Duel.
In the bloody climax of the film, outlaw Lewt is trying to make his getaway to Mexico when he is engaged in a gory gun duel with the vengeful Pearl. She then crawls to him up a jagged cliff to be reunited with her lover for one final embrace before their deaths – ‘one of those chunks of theatrics’, the New York Times said, ‘that ranks with Liza crossing the ice.’
Their final moments, among those red rocks, provide as orgiastic a finale as you could ask for in a 1940s film. Still, Selznick clamored for sexier orchestration. ‘That’s not fucking music,’ he yelled at Dimitri Tiomkin who wrote the score. Angered, Tiomkin shot back: ‘Mr Selznick. You fuck your way and I’ll fuck mine. That’s fucking music!’
King Vidor, concerned with Jones’s safety, wanted to protect her body in these final scenes with insulated padding, but Selznick would have none of it. Jennifer would be inhibited, he said. So Vidor shot the scene as it was.
The result was that by the time the sequence was finally completed to Selznick’s satisfaction, Jones’s arms and stomach were covered with bloodied bruises; and Selznick was beaming at having secured such magnificent footage. Everybody thought it odd, but it wasn’t the only such instance. Selznick drove Jones to excesses of ‘primitive passion,’ in the words of the film’s foreword, as if a man possessed. Vidor even swore that during some of the heated love scenes between Jones and Greg, he could hear Selznick panting in the background.
Annoyed with Selznick’s relentless intrusions, Vidor controlled himself until 10 August 1945, when he was busy trying to direct the shoot-out between Pearl and Lewt. Selznick, judging the latest of many takes to be insufficiently dramatic, took the liberty of dashing stage blood over the actors. ‘You can take this picture and shove it up your ass,’ Vidor told him. It happened that the desert road stretched 8 miles westward without a bend. The whole Duel company, including the perspiring Selznick and the blood spattered Jones, watched in silence as Vidor’s black limousine sped toward the horizon, growing smaller and smaller until it disappeared into a distant row of hills. ‘Well, that’s all for today,’ said Selznick.
He simply replaced Vidor with William Dieterle (Vidor automatically got the screen credit) and finished the film, months behind schedule and more than $1 million over budget. It cost a record of $4,575,000 to make.
When the picture was previewed, Vidor saw that the episode in which Greg blew up a freight train, killing the engineer, was distasteful to the audience, destroying what little sympathy they had for the character. He decided to make one last plea.
He found Selznick shaving himself in the bathroom. He used every conceivable argument against the scene. Aside from the bad taste, he pointed out that when Lewt sang ‘I’ve been working on the railroad,’ as he rode away from the scene of destruction, nothing he could do thereafter would restore him to the good grace of the audience.
Selznick went on shaving. Presently he turned to Vidor and said: ‘I want to make Lewt the worst son of a bitch that’s ever been seen on a motion picture screen, and I believe the train wreck scene will help me prove my point.’
Greg counted the scene among his favorites. He talked jocosely about out-heeling Satan and out-Laurencing Olivier. Recalling watching the train blow up from a distance, and then riding off singing, he said: ‘Well, at that moment I just kind of imitated a cousin of mine (Warren Rannells) who was a beautiful rascal, a black sheep in the family but likeable. He was called Stretch – is no longer with us, but he wouldn’t mind me saying that. I’m sure.’ And there was never any indication on Greg’s part that he worried the public would be repulsed seeing him as the swaggering, feral Lewt. Even years later, recollection of the role brought a smile to his face: ‘I’m a murderer, a rapist, a passer of bad checks. And at the end my old pappy, Lionel Barrymore, in a wheelchair, looks after me affectionately and says, “What a boy, what a boy!”’
With characteristic gusto, Selznick set about publicizing Duel in the Sun. His ideas were original – sometimes bizarre – and they worked. The scam he devised with Paul MacNamara, his longtime publicity man, to publicize Duel was a classic. He obtained lists of names of bartenders in cities and towns all over the country, then hired teams of workers to sit down and write – by hand – thousands of letters, addressing each bartender by his first name:
Hi Charlie,
Well I made it. I’m out here in California finally, and it sure is everything they said it was. The sun shines just about every day. They got palm trees all right, and my sister even has a swimming pool in her back yard. I’m staying with her. We go down to the beach at a place called Santa Monica just about every Saturday or Sunday for a swim in the Pacific Ocean and sometimes downtown to take in a picture. There’s sure a lot of things to see and do here. One of the things I liked best was getting to go out to one of the movie lots and actually see them making a movie. It was called Duel in the Sun, with Jennifer Jones. Boy is she an eyeful! It’s a Western, but not like any Western you ever saw. It’s got a surprise ending. They told me what it was, but said I shouldn’t tell, so I won’t – but it’s sure going to be one of the best pictures of all times.
Well Charlie, I got to go now. Say hi to all the gang there for me will you? Hope to see you soon.
Your old buddy, Joe
Naturally, the bartender would show this letter to the regulars at the bar, and they would try to decide who ‘Joe’ was.
No slouch, Paul MacNamara contributed schemes of his own. He called Walter Winchell, a columnist for the New York Times, and persuaded him to run this item: ‘Paul MacNamara at Hollywood Selznick Studios has been given $1 million for promotion ideas of his new picture, Duel in the Sun. Anybody with an idea call MacNamara. Don’t call me.’
MacNamara was in heaven: the phones rang off the wall. He paid $1 for ideas that would reach 1,000 people and $10 if it reached 100,000. About 10,000 ideas were submitted, and 100 were purchased; maximum money, $1,000; minimum r
esult, public furore. Another of his ideas was to release 5,000 weather balloons announcing the film, one of which contained the number of the winning horse in the Kentucky Derby. The winning balloon was recovered from the top of a high-tension wire in Ohio with MacNamara and Lloyd’s of London holding their breath.
By January 1946, ads were a daily fixture in the trade papers. Five million book versions of the movie were distributed along with T-shirts, light bulbs, lollipops, sunflower seeds, and ‘Sun’ stickers. Tie-ins were made with the circus and with rum drinks called the ‘Sun cocktail.’
Life magazine called these gambits the ‘most expensive and flamboyant publicity campaign ever generated in Hollywood.’ The cover for the sheet music of ‘Got to Get Me Somebody to Love’ showed Greg and Jones lying in the hay, with him laughing and her teasing him with a flower.
Marathon editing sessions got the film out for its 30 December premiere at the Egyptian Theater in Los Angeles, just in time to qualify for the Oscars. Jennifer’s ex-husband Robert Walker and his longtime pal Jim Hennigan went to see Duel in the Sun at the Egyptian. Walker was stunned by what he saw. Sickened. After leaving the theater, the two men went up the street to Musso and Frank’s restaurant, but Walker couldn’t eat a thing. Hennigan recalled him saying bitterly, ‘That bastard, that goddamn bastard.’ Then Walker clutched his hands to his head and let out a piercing shriek: ‘David Selznick!’ Hennigan concluded: ‘I think that eventually he’d have been able to accept Jennifer’s leaving him for another man – a handsome man, say, like Gregory Peck – because of his own deep-rooted inferiority about his physical appearance, but what he couldn’t accept was that a girl he had worshiped, the mother of his children, could have left him solely to gratify her own blind ambition.’ Certainly Selznick’s drive to possess Jennifer Jones contributed to the deterioration of Robert Walker’s already poor state of mind that would lead eventually to his sudden death from drugs and alcohol in 1952.
Los Angeles saw the 138-minute Duel in the Sun and word spread. The picture would not open in the rest of the country until the spring of 1947. Greg was on hand at the Birmingham Hospital in Los Angeles to see 2,000 injured veterans watch the film. The rehabilitation premiere had all the trappings of a Hollywood opening and Greg made the rounds shaking hands.
Hedda Hopper was outraged by the movie. She reared up in the Los Angeles Times: ‘Duel in the Sun is sex rampant. Jennifer Jones as Pearl Chavez is no Bernadette. Gregory Peck as Lewt McCanles is no Father Chisholm. But these two are hotter than a gunman’s pistol.’ The bishop of Los Angeles forbade Catholics from seeing Duel, and it was censored in Memphis and Philadelphia and run out of Hartford.
For Selznick, this was a serious matter. The Roman Catholic Church, through its agency, the National Legion of Decency, dominated the American film censorship scene in the 1930s and 1940s. The National Legion of Decency was formed in 1934 to combat immoral movies. People took a pledge, in church, against bad movies. They pledged not only never to go to any morally objectionable movie, but never even to go to any movie theater that had ever shown a morally objectionable film. The Legion claimed membership of over 11 million Americans – about one moviegoer in 12 – and had the power to bring moguls such as David O Selznick to their knees.
There was also, of course, the volatile notoriety of Selznick and Jones themselves. Playing on her performance in The Song of Bernadette, the media had a field day with headlines such as ‘From Saint to Sinner in Just Three Years!’
Selznick needn’t have worried too much. Often when a parish priest ranted against a movie, it aroused the curiosity of his parishioners sufficiently for them to rush out to see it.
As the tempest over Duel mounted, Representative John Rankin (Democrat in Mississippi and a longtime enemy of Hollywood) felt compelled to bring the matter before Congress. He took the floor and read a letter from Lloyd T Binford, head of motion picture censorship in Memphis, Tennessee: ‘This production contains all the inequities of the foulest human dross. It is sadism at its deepest level. It is the fleshpots of the Pharaohs, modernized and filled to overflowing. It is a barbaric symphony of passion and hatred, spilling from a blood-tinted screen. It is mental and physical putrefaction.’
Meanwhile, Selznick had formed his own release company, cutting distribution costs by 60 per cent. He also had the idea – novel for the time – of opening the picture in many theaters simultaneously, a way of cleaning up quickly and outflanking bad reviews.
Though many critics panned the film, their reviews are a joy to read as minor masterpieces of sarcastic wit that Duel’s publicity campaign had virtually begged for. Here’s a selection:
It cannot be said that in putting together his hymn to the West Mr. Selznick has stinted on anything. He has provided actors enough for a dozen movies, horses enough to equip every milk route in the country, and clichés enough to make his film an imposing example of specious vacuity.
When a single movie offers murder, rape, attempted fratricide, train-wrecking, fisticuffs, singing, dancing, drunkenness, religion, war, prostitution, fancy equitation and sacred and profane love, all in 135 minutes, the fact that it has neither taste nor art is not likely to deter the unsqueamish.
Life magazine
Whenever night falls in the course of Duel in the Sun, the faces of the gentlemen in the picture turn blue. This is the most interesting aspect of this Technicolor saga of the old days in Texas, which was written, produced, and furiously ballyhooed by David O. Selznick, a man who doesn’t believe in hiding his light under anything smaller than the celestial concave. I have no idea whether Mr. Selznick intended the males in his film to take on a Surrealist hue in his nocturnal scenes, but the fact that they do provides a lively contrast between them and the heroine, played by Jennifer Jones, whose fiery complexion might lead you to suspect that the makeup man had been baking her in a kiln for several weeks before the film was shot.
The New Yorker
. . . There are some hot scenes, not counting how that girl wraps herself around every doorway and wall she encounters; and the end, when the dying Pearl claws her way through half an acre of opalescent hills to reach her no-good lover whom she has accurately and repeatedly shot, is very affecting.
Shirley O’Hara, The New Republic
. . . if only the dramatics were up to the technical style. But they’re not. Nor are the performances, which are strangely uneven – all of them. The best and most consistent is that of Mr. Peck, who makes of the renegade brother a credibly vicious and lawless character . . .
Bosley Crowther, The New York Times
The only notable acting is that done by Gregory Peck. As the lecher at Spanish Bit he is eminently convincing. This is a picture that will enrapture many persons, and I don’t want to spoil their fun. But don’t mistake it for a good movie just because it’s a big movie.
Bradford F Swan The Providence Journal
The releasing company’s campaign, abetted by the censorship publicity, was followed by a crafty use of saturation booking. The film opened simultaneously in 300 theaters, a merchandising milestone for the motion picture industry. With grosses of $11,300,000 Duel in the Sun finished third for the year behind Song of the South and The Best Years of Our Lives.
Jennifer Jones and Lillian Gish earned Oscar nominations for Best Actress, which went to Olivia de Havilland for To Each His Own and Best Supporting Actress, which went to Anne Baxter for The Razor’s Edge. In 1979, King Vidor received his only Oscar, an honorary one presented by Audrey Hepburn.
The bond Greg forged with Selznick during Spellbound and Duel in the Sun continued for years to come, despite their very different styles and values. Patricia Neal recalled having dinner with Greg, Greta and David Selznick in New York in 1945 when she was starring in her first Broadway play, Another Part of the Forest, by Lillian Hellman. ‘Mr Peck was gracious and charming and such a perfect gentleman that he convinced me that tales I had heard about Hollywood were false. Mr Selznick proved that everything I heard about H
ollywood was true. He got very drunk, told me how much he loved Jennifer Jones, and then tried to get me into bed.’ Neal became so livid she almost kicked Selznick down the stairs. (Jones married Selznick in Genoa, Italy, on 13 July 1949.)
Greg, the team player, put up with Selznick’s antics and when complimented on his role in Duel, he tossed the bouquet to his leading lady. ‘Jennifer Jones was one of the main reasons I loved this part. I had never worked with her before, but had admired her work on screen.’
Thirty-eight years after they made the movie together, Greg and Jones were at an Academy Award reception. Jones, radiant in a gold lamé dress, was standing talking to Greg when he noticed a man staring at them. Greg invited him over and introduced him to the actress. The man, a Spanish director, said: ‘Forgive me for staring. The first movie I ever saw was Duel in the Sun. I flew from Madrid and arrived in the United States today for the first time. On my first visit I win the Academy Award, and now I see that Pearl and Lewt are still together. What a wonderful country the United States is!’ While shooting Duel in the Sun, Greg also made The Yearling (1946), a Pulitzer Prize winning tale about a lonely boy who adopts and is adopted by an orphaned fawn during the post-Civil War period. The two films were in various stages of production for periods of more than a year each and their overlapping schedules caused Greg to go back and forth between them. Both pictures were complex in construction, requiring extended periods on location, and were plagued with problems.
The Yearling’s author, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, was just the sort of bohemian character who intrigued Greg. She wrote on old upright typewriters in her sprawling farmhouse – a Royal on the screened porch and an L C Smith & Corona Silent on a night stand in her bedroom. Day and night she pounded away while drinking coffee and liquor, and chain-smoking unfiltered Lucky Strikes. The Yearling, as well as her other stories, helped put Florida on the map – and herself as well. Rawlings’ home became a popular stopping off place for literati such as F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway who appreciated the gin swirling in the bathtub and the red roses floating in the toilet bowl. Rawlings had lived through several attempts to turn her book into a movie and she wasn’t sure about Peck’s fitness for the part. ‘You’ll like him,’ A J Cronin, author of the novel The Keys of the Kingdom, assured her: ‘He’s a nice boy.’