Desert Fury (1947)

Absolutely the worst movie.

It is not only a funny movie, but it allows a great amount of joy for anyone who watches it.

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

This is one of the great crypto-gay B movies of its day. If you take the ridiculous story line at all seriously, it couldn't rate more than a 4. But, if you scratch the almost non-existent veneer, it's definitely worth a 7 for its ability to sustain the ambiguous sexuality of the plot for the full 90 minutes. Can a good girl who knows she likes it bad be happy with bisexuality and incest? Or will censorship and patriarchy force her into submission? It's a festival of bitch slapping, double entendres, guns as phallic symbols and a pigskin glove. Plus, Mary Astor is great as the hard-nosed old gal who talks straight and steers queer. I wish they still made them like this. Kind of makes you miss the days when they had to really work overtime to make gay films.

Although Desert Fury was the first film actually released under his studio of Paramount, Burt Lancaster had already made quite a splash for himself in The Killers and Brute Force. In this one he's third billed behind John Hodiak and Lizabeth Scott and all he really does here is flash the pearly whites and be a stalwart hero as a deputy sheriff.John Hodiak is a notorious gambler/racketeer has come home to Chuckawalla, Nevada where the Queen of the town Mary Astor with her casino runs the place. Hodiak left the place under a cloud with the death of his wife in an automobile accident which looked suspicious, but no one can prove anything.Astor's daughter Lizabeth Scott who just quit yet another school is intrigued with Hodiak, but everyone's against the pairing, Astor, Lancaster who has a thing for Scott himself, and Hodiak's sidekick and gunsill Wendell Corey who has a most interesting and quite gay relationship with Hodiak.Desert Fury is one of those several films from the studio days where gay was strictly taboo yet it somehow got to the screen. That scene where Corey tells Scott how he met a ragged and hungry Hodiak at the Automat and bought him a meal and took him home sure sounded like a pickup to me. Many from the generation before Stonewall told me that the Horn&Hardart Automat was one of the great pickup places in New York. Romances and flings have started in stranger places. No way that the writers would not have known that. Corey's devotion to Hodiak can't be explained any other way as the story unfolds. In fact he's the stronger of the two.Corey and Mary Astor walk off with the acting honors. Astor covers a lot of the story's defects with a bravura performance that Bette Davis or Barbara Stanwyck would envy. Desert Fury neither helped or hurt the rising career of Burt Lancaster, but he's far from the center of this story.

Oh god, what a petrie dish fry up! DESERT FURY is literally hysterical, like a shrill daytime soapie with cinema values. Made in 1947 in perfect glossy Technicolor to distract you from the beserkness and tawdry storyline, this is one terrific exercise in censorship busting antics that managed to fulfill it's reputation. Lizabeth Scott, like a naughty green fairy loose from a bottle of Absinthe, Wendell Corey as the housewife to creepy-teeth gangster mate John Hodiak, Burt Lancaster pretending he doesn't know and Mary Astor the battle cruiser mother each out vie each other in every scene with a regular exchange of niceties followed by face slapping or tantrum and threat. Every scene, like a roundelay of temperament. DESERT FURY is genuine queer cinema. With incest hinted, guns and car tyre screeching, sinister sunglass wearing and cactus pricks everywhere, this wacky hussy of a film makes for a terrific couch night with friends who have never seen it.

Sporting a title that is better suited to an exotic Western or an Arabian Nights romp, it is small wonder perhaps that this noir-ish melodrama turns out to be more of a glossy soaper. This combination – and, indeed, the plot itself – seems to indicate an attempt at another MILDRED PIERCE (1945) but the end result is certainly less rewarding. In fact, all-powerful businesswoman/mother Mary Astor gets to experience her student/daughter Lizabeth Scott's hard-headed ungratefulness with the appearance of ex-flame John Hodiak. Local cop Burt Lancaster (third-billed in his third movie) is enamoured with Scott himself and does not take Hodiak's unwarranted attentions sitting down. Unfortunately, for most of the time, the film resolves itself into a series of clashes between these four characters but, thankfully, Paramount's unusual decision to film 'in glorious Technicolor' (to use the famous advertising term) makes the rather dreary proceedings more easy on the eye than they would otherwise have been. This is not to say that the film is without interest: Lancaster is always worth watching, Mary Astor is fine in a character role not too far removed from her trademark role of the scheming Brigid O'Shaugnessy in John Huston's THE MALTESE FALCON (1941) and Miklos Rozsa's musical accompaniment is typically brooding. Besides, to counter the (no pun intended) somewhat colorless central relationship between Scott and Hodiak, we are treated to the highly ambiguous one between Hodiak and his long-suffering sidekick (an impressive turn from a debuting Wendell Corey): not only is Corey relegated to doing the house chores while Hodiak sunbathes topless but, in the admittedly strong climax, we see the reality of their interchangeable personalities two decades before Ingmar Bergman's PERSONA (1966) and Cammell-Roeg's PERFORMANCE (1970)!