"Duel in the Swamps" was King Vidor's own characterization of Ruby Gentry during production. He wasn't mocking it so much as continuing an argument. Ruby Gentry is the less digressive, more socially conscious melodrama of elemental physicality that Duel in the Sun (coming November 16) would have been if Vidor had had his way in disputes with producer David O. Selznick. This time Vidor was his own producer, and the result is the last, arguably the best, certainly the most personal of his series of postwar melodramas that include The Fountainhead and Beyond the Forest (November 30). The Chinese-box structure compresses into 82 minutes the years of conflict between a Southern town and a lower-class woman (Jennifer Jones). Her loved and hated soulmate is a sweaty, pre-Moses Charlton Heston, last of a decaying aristocratic line, who dreams of draining the swamps covering his ancestral lands, thus both restoring the family name and enriching the town. All the key American conflicts of money, family, class and ambition are argued out through a melodramatic dialectic, where rational understanding is quickly forgotten as outrage is topped by counter-outrage. In Hollywood terms, it was an oddity, with its major stars in a production so violently personal and low-budget ($240,000 plus $330,000 deferred). Ruby Gentry is the film noir imbued with fervor. Scott Simmon