“I think it makes a difference when a movie is physically bigger than you. I mean that. Your relationship to it changes.” — film critic Bilge Ebiri.
There’s no disputing that King Vidor‘s Duel in the Sun (’46), the derided David O. Selznick-produced western that became known as Lust in the Dust, is a groaner. Ditto The Fountainhead (’49), a boldly sexual adaption of Ayn Rand‘s novel with Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal. A pair of unsubtle big-studio movies about passion and fucking — overwrought and overplayed.
And yet I’ve never seen either in a theatre of any kind, and the Film Society of Lincoln Center is showing presumably handsome 35mm prints of both on Saturday as part of a Vidor retrospective. I’m tempted for obvious reasons.
