One Of Martin Scorsese's Favorite Westerns Is Nearly Impossible To Watch

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

If you're a film buff, you can almost certainly cite the first movie you saw in a theater. Mine was "Star Wars." I was three years old, and screamed in terror when the lights dimmed. I was enchanted for a whole ten minutes or so before conking out — though I did rouse for the trench run. I finally watched "Star Wars" in its entirety during its 1978 rerelease, and that experience of, to my four-year-old mind, having watched a movie that was shot in space is an exhilaration I've been chasing for the last 47 years.

I was fortunate that my introduction to the transporting magic of the movies came via the most pivotal piece of cinema, commercially and artistically, since "Gone with the Wind." Meanwhile, there's some kid out there whose first trip to the theater was to see Tim Allen in "Jungle 2 Jungle." They're probably a Big Pharma executive now. Or in prison. Or a Big Pharma executive who belongs in prison.

But what about the great filmmakers? Do they remember their first theatrical excursion, what they saw and how it hit them? We know from Steven Spielberg's semi-autobiographical film "The Fabelmans" that he fell head over heels in love with movies when he saw Cecil B. DeMille's circus extravaganza "The Greatest Show on Earth," while John Woo recalls wishing he could escape his poverty-stricken existence by going to the fantastical world of Victor Fleming's "The Wizard of Oz."

Which naturally leads us to one of our most brilliant working directors and the most passionate champion of the medium living today. We are, of course, talking about Martin Scorsese. If you're a fan of the filmmaker, you probably know which movie captivated him at a very young age. What you might not realize, however, is that it is not currently streaming and is hard to track down on physical media.

When Martin Scorsese received the Producers Guild of America's David O. Selznick Achievement Award on February 25, 2024, the filmmaker struck a nostalgic tone as he recalled winning the organization's Jesse L. Laskey intercollegiate award for his student film "It's Not Just You, Murray!" all the way back in 1965. He shared the dais that evening with some of the biggest names in the history of motion pictures: James Stewart, Samuel Goldwyn, Jack Warner, Cary Grant, Alfred Hitchcock and David O. Selznick. And he recalled how those last two men, giants of the industry, waged fierce battles during their three collaborations.

"The thing about these guys, they cared," said Scorsese. "This is a keyword — obsessed — by the cinema. They both lived their obsessions. Selznick dictated those infamous memos. That's what the memos were about, the obsession."

Scorsese's obsession was ignited when, at the age of either six or four (both have been cited in the past), his mother took him to see the Selznick-written and -produced "Duel in the Sun." Though the film had been condemned by the Catholic church, Scorsese's mother (immortalized in many of the director's movies) didn't give a rip. "The kid likes Westerns," she said. "I'm taking him."

All these years later, Scorsese can still remember the spell "Duel in the Sun" cast over him. As he told the PGA Awards attendees, "Slashes of color, movement, the landscapes, stunning set pieces like the dance in the cantina, the approaching horsemen lining up against the railroad, the mysticism of the film mixed with the profane. It's played out on a larger-than-life screen by larger-than-life actors." And its influence is still turning up in his work. "At one point, Lionel Barrymore says, 'There's a strange glow in the sky tonight.' Those figures of him in the buggy are silhouetted against a red sky. That's 1946, and I was sure that those figures wound up in my film 'Killers of the Flower Moon,' the sequence with the prairie on fire at night. It stayed with me all those years."

Now that you're dying to see the film that, in essence, gave us Martin Scorsese, I regret to inform you that a "like new" used copy of the 2017 "Duel in the Sun" Blu-ray is going to run you $79. As for streaming, it's completely unavailable. Legitimately. You can find the film nicknamed "Lust in the Dust" fairly quickly if you hit up the search engine of your choosing, but I'm not going to provide a direct link because I'm not sure it's a wholly legal upload.

All I'll say is that "Duel in the Sun" is a one-of-a-kind epic Western where the woman (Jennifer Jones) is the protagonist. King Vidor is the director of credit, but as was Selznick's wont, he brought in other helmers to shoot certain sections of the movie (e.g. Josef von Sternberg, William Cameron Menzies and William Dieterle). It's a flawed movie, but gorgeously shot and unusually erotic for its era.