Passion and furor swirl around Duel in the Sun, King Vidor and David O. Selznick's Technicolor western, from the novel by Niven Busch. It's hard to say, however, whether there was more passion on screen (with its exhilaratingly excessive bang-bang-kiss-kiss climax), from outraged critics (who dubbed the film "Lust in the Dust"), or behind the camera (with Vidor quitting the production after one too many personally delivered memos from producer and credited scriptwriter Selznick). Niven Busch will be on hand tonight to help unravel these issues. To bring to the screen what remains the top box-office western (in inflation-adjusted dollars), Selznick employed another eight directors, including himself, Josef von Sternberg, William Cameron Menzies, and William Dieterle, who added the garish saloon-dance prologue. As it finally arrived on screen, Duel in the Sun is a lurid tale of a young "half-breed" (Jennifer Jones) who, after the execution of her father for the murder of her Indian mother, is adopted into the household of a pioneering cattle baron (Lionel Barrymore), his wife (Lillian Gish) and their temperamentally opposite sons (hotheaded Gregory Peck and rational Joseph Cotten). Whatever the contributions of others, the film's delirious pitch is recognizably in Vidor's best postwar mode (the final example of which in this retrospective will be Beyond the Forest in two weeks), a melodramatic style easily criticized by those accustomed to the mellower, "humanist" Vidor. In an attempt to quell the censorship furor, Duel was cut by nine minutes before wide release. Although The Museum of Modern Art has recovered only the shorter version, its print is a spectacularly accurate reproduction of the original deeply saturated Technicolor. Scott Simmon