TIlly Losch | 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.

(For those following at home, Lisa is attempting to clean out her DVR by watching and reviewing 38 films by this Friday. Will she make it? Keep following the site to find out!)

The 1937 film The Good Earth is a strange one.

It’s a big, epic film about life in China in the years before World War I. It opens with a poor farmer named Wang (Paul Muni) marrying a servant girl named O-Lan (Luise Rainer). O-Lan is quiet but strong and, with her support, Wang eventually starts to prosper. He buys land and they have children. Together, Wang and O-Lan manage to survive both famine and a political upheaval. In fact, it’s China’s volatile politics that occasionally allow the family to survive. When a revolutionary mob loots a mansion, O-Lan joins in just long enough to come across a bag of diamonds that the Wang uses to eventually buy the biggest house in town. Once he’s become wealthy and complacent, Wang ends up taking on a younger, second wife (Tilly Losch) and O-Lan finds herself competing for his attention. Ultimately, it’s only when Wang is again forced to tend to the Earth that he understands what is really important.

So, here’s the weird thing about The Good Earth. It’s a film about China. It covers several years of Chinese history and the story itself is rooted in Chinese culture. All of the characters are meant to be Chinese. When the movie was filmed, China was at war with Japan so it’s not surprising that the film was shot in California. But what is interesting (though not really surprising when you consider the history of Hollywood) is that there are very few Chinese people in the cast and none of them play any of the major roles.

Instead, Wang was played by Austria-born, Chicago-raised Paul Muni. O-Lan was played by German Luise Rainer. Wang’s comic relief uncle was played by American character actor Walter Connolly while his father was played by a former vaudeville star from Ohio named Charley Grapewin. All of the actors are heavily made up so that they’ll look Chinese but none of them act or sound Chinese. It makes for a very strange viewing experience.

And it’s a bit unfortunate because there are some very good scenes in The Good Earth. Technically, it’s a very strong film. Towards the end, there’s a locust invasion that is still thrilling to watch. The sets look great. The costumes look great. If you’re a history nerd like me, the story has the potential to be interesting. But, whenever you start to get sucked into the film’s story, Wang starts to speak and sounds totally like a guy from Chicago and it takes you out of the movie. The uneven mix of quality and miscast actors makes for a rather disjointed viewing experience.

As a big epic, it’s probably not surprising that The Good Earth was nominated for best picture. However, it lost to another Paul Muni film, The Life of Emile Zola.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iEREqQjjzU