Plot
Pearl Chavez (Jennifer Jones) is orphaned after her father Scott Chavez (Herbert Marshall) kills her mother (Tilly Losch), having caught his wife with a lover (Sidney Blackmer). Before his execution, Chavez arranges for Pearl to live with his second cousin and old sweetheart, Laura Belle (Lillian Gish).
Arriving by stagecoach, Pearl is met by Jesse McCanles (Joseph Cotten), one of Laura Belle's two grown sons. He takes her to Spanish Bit, their enormous cattle ranch. The gentle and gracious Laura Belle is happy to welcome her to their home, but not so her husband, the wheelchair-using Senator Jackson McCanles (Lionel Barrymore), who calls her "a half-breed" and jealously despises her father.
The second son, Lewt (Gregory Peck), is a ladies man with a personality quite unlike that of his gentlemanly brother Jesse. He expresses his interest in Pearl in direct terms and she takes a strong dislike to him. Laura Belle calls in Mr. Jubal Crabbe, the "Sinkiller" (Walter Huston), a gun-toting preacher, to counsel Pearl on how to avoid the evils of temptation. Pearl is determined to remain "a good girl."
When she is overpowered by Lewt in her bedroom one night, Pearl is angry with him and ashamed of her own behavior. But she also cannot help but be flattered by his lust and attentions. Jesse, meanwhile, is ostracized by his father and no longer welcome at the ranch after siding with railroad men, headed by Mr. Langford (Otto Kruger), against the Senator's personal interests. Jesse is in love with Pearl but he leaves for Austin to pursue a political career and becomes engaged to Helen Langford (Joan Tetzel), Langford's daughter.
Offended when Lewt reneges on a promise to marry her, Pearl takes up with Sam Pierce (Charles Bickford), a neighboring rancher who is smitten with her. She does not love him but says yes to his proposal. Before they can be married, however, Lewt picks a fight with Pierce in a saloon and guns him down. He insists that Pearl can belong only to him. However, Lewt becomes a wanted man.
On the run from the law, Lewt finds time to derail a train and occasionally drop by the ranch late at night and foist his attentions on Pearl. She cannot resist her desire for him and lies for Lewt to the law, hiding him in her room.
Laura Belle's health takes a turn for the worse and the Senator admits his love for her before she dies. Jesse returns to visit but is too late; his mother is dead. The Senator continues to shun him, as does Lewt, their family feud finally resulting in a showdown. Lewt tosses a gun to his unarmed brother but before it can be picked up, he shoots Jesse.
The Senator's old friend, Lem Smoot (Harry Carey) tells him that Jesse is going to make it and the old man softens up towards his son. A livid Pearl is relieved that Jesse is going to survive. When Helen arrives, she invites Pearl to leave Spanish Bit forever and come live with them in Austin. Pearl agrees, but she is tipped off by one of the Spanish Bit hands, Sid (Scott McKay) that Lewt intends to come after Jesse again. She arms herself and engages in a shootout with Lewt in the desert, where they die in each other's arms.
Read more about this topic: Duel In The Sun (film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)