Scott McKay | Through the Shattered Lens

After her father is executed for killing her mother and her mother’s lover, “half-breed” Pearl Chavez (Jennifer Jones) is sent to live with her father’s second cousin, Laura Beth McCanles (Lillian Gish). Laura is the wife of rancher, politician, and all-around racist Senator Jackson McCanles (Lionel Barrymore). Worried that Pearl’s beauty and uninhibited manner will get her into trouble, Laura arranges for Pearl to meet with a minister known as The Sinkller (Walter Huston) who instructs Pearl on how to be a “good” girl.

Wanting to make Pearl bad and his, Lewton “Lewt” McCanles (Gregory Peck) becomes obsessed with Pearl and is soon forcing himself on her on a regular basis. When the good McCanles brother, Jesse (Joseph Cotten), leaves the ranch despite being in love with Pearl, Pearl tries to find a good husband in the form of Sam Pierce (Charles Bickford). Lewt responds by gunning Sam down and then goes on the run. It all leads to an overwrought duel in the sun as the two doomed lovers take aim at each other.

Duel In The Sun is credited to veteran director King Vidor and there are a few shots of the western landscape that do feel typical of Vidor’s work. However, Duel In The Sun’s true auteur was its producer, David O. Selznick. Still looking to recapture his earlier success with Gone With The Wind and eager to make his future wife, Jennifer Jones, into an even bigger star than she was, Selznick obsessed over every detail of Duel In The Sun, pushing Vidor and a host of other directors (including Josef von Sternberg, William Dieterle, William Cameron Menzies, Otto Brower, and Sidney Franklin) to make the film more steamy, more melodramatic, more violent, and more visually epic. Reportedly, while Video was trying to shoot the film’s titular duel, he had to call cut several times when Selznick ran into the scene with a water bottle to spray more “sweat” onto Jones and Peck. Today, the stiff Peck seems miscast as the black sheep of the family, the reserved Jones is even more miscast as a mestiza, and the plot is clearly too simplistic to carry the film’s epic ambitions. A few impressive shots aside, Duel In The Sun is just boring, In the 40s, though, the film’s relative openness about sex generated enough controversy to make Duel In The Sun into a box office hit. It was one of the two top-grossing westerns of the 40s, beating out Red River, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, The Ox-Bow Incident, and several other films that were actually good.

Unlike Jones, Peck, and even usually reliable stalwart like Lionel Barrymore and Walter Huston, Joseph Cotten at least emerges from this film with his dignity intact. Playing the good brother, Cotten gets to underplay while everyone else is overplaying and it turns out to be the right approach for him. Surviving Duel In The Sun was no easy feat but Cotten pulled it off.

The fifth film in Mill Creek’s Fabulous Forties box set was 1944’s Guest In The House. Before I get around to actually reviewing the film, there two important things that I need to share.

First off, according to the imdb, when Guest In The House was released into theaters, it ran a total of 121 minutes. The version that was released on video — the version that I watched for this review — only runs 100 minutes. Having watched the film, it’s hard for me to guess what could have been included in those 21 minutes. There’s no major plot holes in the 100 minute version or any unanswered questions. It’s hard for me to imagine that there could be anything in those 21 minutes that would have made Guest In The House a better film than the version that I watched last night. If anything, even at just 100 minutes, the version that I saw still felt too long!

Secondly, Guest In The House was re-released several times. At one point, the title was changed to Satan In Skirts! That has got to be one of the greatest titles ever! Seriously, Guest In The House is such a boring and mundane title. But Satan in Skirts — I mean, that sounds like something that you just have to watch, doesn’t it?

Anyway, Guest In The House is about a guest in the house. Shocking, right? Evelyn (Anne Baxter, playing a character similar to her classic role in All About Eve) is a mentally unstable woman with a heart ailment and a morbid fear of birds. She has recently become engaged to Dr. Dan Proctor (Scott Proctor) but she spends most her time writing nasty things about him in her diary.

Dan takes her to visit his wealthy Aunt Martha (Aline MacMahon). Also staying at Martha’s is Dan’s older brother, an artist named Douglas (Ralph Bellamy). Douglas is married to Ann (Ruth Warrick, who also played Kane’s first wife in Citizen Kane). Also living at the house is Douglas’s model, Miriam (Marie McDonald).

(“I used to have to hire one model for above the neck and one model for below the neck,” Douglas explains as Miriam poses for him, “But you’re the whole package!”)

When Evelyn has a panic attack upon seeing a bird, Douglas calms her down by drawing a woman on a lampshade. (Yes, that’s exactly what he does.) This leads to Evelyn becoming obsessed with Douglas. Soon, she is manipulating the entire household, trying to drive away Dan and Miriam while, at the same time, try to break up Douglas and Ann’s marriage….

So, does this sound like a Lifetime film to anyone? Well, it should because Guest In The House is basically a 1940s version of almost every film that aired on Lifetime last year. Normally that would be a good thing but, unlike the best Lifetime films, Guest In The House isn’t any fun. It should be fun, considering how melodramatic the storyline is. However, Guest In The House takes a prestige approach to its story, marking this as one of those films that was made to win Oscars as opposed to actually entertaining audiences. Other than a few time when Evelyn imagines that she’s being attacked by invisible birds, the film never allows itself to truly go over-the-top.

Lovers of The Wizard of Oz might want to note that the Wicked Witch of the West herself, Margaret Hamilton, plays a maid in this film but, in the end, Guest In The House is mostly just interesting as a precursor to Anne Baxter’s performance in All About Eve.