The Last Sunset
With Rock Hudson, Kirk Douglas, Dorothy Malone.
US, 1961, 35mm, color, 113 min.
Print source: Universal
The lone project Aldrich undertook in Mexico during his four-year exile from the United States, this Technicolor Western is an oddball blend of Freudian fixations and Shakespearean tragedy, with Kirk Douglas sporting what must be the most Elizabethan cowboy getup in the genre’s history. A black-clad catalyst for the Dalton Trumbo-scripted tempest of romantic entanglements, Douglas plays an expatriate cowboy fixing to steal back the heart of an old flame at her south-of-the-border homestead when Rock Hudson drifts in carrying a warrant for his hanging—as well as a gust of Sirkian melodrama. Passions and rivalries flare up over the course of a long cattle drive to Texas in the company of Dorothy Malone’s world-weary matron and her blossoming teenage daughter, who brings her own inadvertently incestuous desires into the mix. Marked by a lyrical use of the arid Mexican landscape and an uncharacteristically expressive treatment of color—from the violet night skies to Malone’s salmon lips—The Last Sunset builds to queasy emotional complications before burning out in one of the most stirringly edited climaxes of Aldrich’s career.
