"Actor: Joan Tetzel"

• Duel in the Sun--Roadshow Edition | DVD | (08/04/2002) from £6.00   |  Saving you £-0.01 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Before creating Duel in the Sun, legendary producer David O Selznick dreamed of making another magnum opus like his 1939 production of Gone with the Wind; he also proposed to make Jennifer Jones, his ladylove then second wife, a megastar. Thus Duel in the Sun (Lust in the Dust to some) was created as an extravagant Technicolor epic about the collision of the old West with the new, offering wide-open spaces with railroads and barbed wire, and juxtaposing character traits such as hot-blooded outlaws alongside civilised folk who are often wimpy or unwell. The film begins among giant rocks drenched in a blood-red sunset, with velvet-voiced Orson Welles intoning the legend of doomed Pearl Chavez and her demon lover; Duel in the Sun never strays far from lush romanticism, spiced with a dash of S/M. The cast is huge (a lubriciously wicked Gregory Peck, Lillian Gish, Joseph Cotton, Lionel Barrymore, Walter Huston, Harry Carey, Herbert Marshall, Charles Bickford, Butterfly McQueen) and there are unforgettable set pieces, the most notable being the lovers' final shootout among those red rocks, as orgiastic a finale as you could ask for. --Kathleen Murphy, Amazon.com

• The Paradine Case | DVD | (08/04/2002) from £14.40   |  Saving you £-8.41 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  This minor 1948 film by Alfred Hitchcock beats a familiar Hitchcockian drum: an attorney (Gregory Peck), in love with the client (Alida Valli) he is defending on a murder charge, implicates himself in her guilt by trying to put the blame on another man. The no-one-is-innocent theme may be consistent with Hitchcock's best films and world view, but this is one of the movies that got away from his crucial passion for the plastic side of creative directing. Stuck in a courtroom for much of the story, the film is fit to burst with possibility but is pinned down like a freshly caught butterfly in someone's airless collection. --Tom Keogh

• Duel in the Sun (Roadshow Edition) | DVD | (15/08/2017) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A