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| 57 Dear Diary: Overheard on the set today: “Mr. O. eats directors for breakfast?” (He’s such a meanie.) What about wives, I asked? Anyway, Diary, all I can sayis that we better fall to our knees and thank darling Howard Hughes for designing the push-up bra three years before we’d need it for our Pearl on Duel in the Sun. Otherwise Jenny J. would have nothing to heave at the cameras. Note to Self: Invite Miss Jones to din-din tonight. Exclude Mr. O; that producer-husband of hers would make it an awkward threesome. Love ya loads, Hollywood Duel in the Sun t t t Gary Harrington A Brady Bunch station wagon pulls up in front of the SandiaArmyBaseTheaterinAlbuquerque,NewMexico. Five brothers, ranging in age from teenager to toddler, pile out. Regulation army haircuts, patched jeans, and collared,polyestershort-sleevedshirtsbuttonedtothetop. Although we are all Comanche/white, I’m the only dark one, smack dab in the middle of the birth order, wearing the dependent-personnel military-issue glassesandlookinglikeErnieDouglas’stwinfromtheTVshowMyThreeSons.Thestationwagon pulls off, and we go inside to watch old Westerns and second-run movies while my mother and sister get groceries at the base commissary and my dad fights for all of us in Da Nang. It’s 1969. DuelintheSun(1946)isoneofthosetypicalmovieswewouldhaveseenataSaturdaymatinee over forty years ago. David O. Selznick was trying to repeat the epic magic he’d conjured up for Gone with the Wind (1939). A top-notch cast of big stars, a musical score that would later be released on vinyl (a first), and a modern marketing campaign comprised of wide and early distribution assured that the movie would be a blockbuster. Selznick even wrote the adapted screenplayhimself.However,DuelintheSunsufferedthesamefateasAvatar(2009)wouldsome sixty years later: kowtowing to a megalomaniac control freak may make for heaps of money in 58| Gary Harrington the short term, but it doesn’t often make for great movies that stand the test of time. Although Duel in the Sun was a financial success, Selznick’s attempt to pander to the baser, prurient desires of the movie-going public earned the movie the nickname of “Lust in the Dust,” and a place on the matinee playbill of backwater army bases in the late 1960s. The movie opens with a musical prelude and overture by Dimitri Tiomkin played over a still-frame image of the Old West. Tiomkin would later win an Oscar for his score in High Noon (1952). An Orson Welles voice-over narration of a supposed local legend about a flower is interjected. When the live action starts, Pearl Chavez (Jennifer Jones), the child of a Native American dancehall girl and down-on-his-luck poker player Scott Chavez (Herbert Marshall), isdancingtothedelightoflovelylittleMexicanchildrencostumedinsombrerosandgreasyhair. Pearl’s dancing is simple and unspoiled, but we hear the primitive, throbbing tom-toms beating inside the dancehall. At this point, if the movie had been shot today, I could easily imagine a Scorsese-style tracking shot through a seedy strip club, starting from the low-life barker outside the door, dollying through the corpulent and sweaty clientele, and up to a bored and skanky over-the-hill woman sliding down her stripper pole. But, this is the golden age of cinema, where bigger-than-life and grimeless depictions of the Old West were commonplace, so instead we’re treated to a flashy representative (a totem, if you will) pole dance by Pearl’s Native American mother (played in heavy brown makeup by Tilly Losch, better known for her earlier portrayal of a Chinese woman in the 1937 film The Good Earth). Losch’s full-blooded, unbridled, savage performance goads the hundreds of leering cowboys and card players into a very Freudian, pistol-shooting frenzy. As Pearl’s mother is flashing her dance panties, Pearl’s father is tucked into a corner of the dancehall playing cards when he suddenly realizes that his wife is a slut. After her dance, Pearl’s motherslipsoffwithacustomer,butChaveztracksthemdownandkillsthemboth.He’shanged for the killings, even though in Texas at the time (1880s), a cuckold killing his wife and her lover “in the act” ranked right up there with jaywalking as to the seriousness of the offense. For the sake of full disclosure, I should mention that in the early 1900s, my great-grandfather was caught “hiking the Appalachian trail” near Lawton, Oklahoma, with a woman not his wife, and suffered a similar fate at the hand, or gun, of her husband. The husband got off free and clear. Of course...

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