Lizabeth Scott is courted by Burt Lancaster and John Hodiak but all she wants is to run her mother's casino in 1947's Desert Fury. It's an interesting movie that has generated a lot of discussion for its possible inclusion of homosexuality but I wouldn't call it a good or especially enjoyable film.
John Hodiak gets top billing and I've seen him in movies. He was in Lifeboat and The Harvey Girls but I didn't remember him. There's not much remarkable about him except at the very end of the movie he puts on a really nice, demoniac grin. He might have been a good Joker. The opening credits end with "Introducing Wendell Corey". At least I remembered Corey from various roles but I never would have imagined he rated an "introducing" at the age of 37. I guess he'd had a good stage career up to that point.
Hodiak and Corey play Eddie and Johnny, a couple of crooks who come to the desert town of Chuckawalla in Nevada where they catch the eye of Paula (Lizabeth Scott). I love the offbeat location for this movie. The reddish soil and bright green foliage is striking in the Technicolour and sets a pace for the film's lurid colour palette.
It's debated whether Eddie and Johnny are actually a gay couple. I think they are and were intended to be though it's portrayed as an aspect of their crooked behaviour. Johnny's unwholesome influence on Eddie is part of what makes him a bad match for Paula. That and he seems to have murdered his previous wife. He has a rage problem, too, which Hodiak plays ham-fistedly.
Apparently people also think there's a coded lesbian relationship between Paula and her mother, played by Mary Astor. That I don't see. All their dialogue is about whether or not she should follow in her mother's footsteps and what her deceased father would think. I could see the two of them playing lovers in another movie. Astor looked young for 47 and Scott always looked like she was 90 though she was in fact 27 here. It's her voice, too. I try to imagine what she must have seemed like in the '40s, how her brittle voice and gaunt features could have been interpreted as youthful but I just can't. She's not an exceptionally good performer, either, and I suppose this is all why she's not as well remembered as Bergman or Fontaine.
Burt Lancaster plays a cop who tries to be a good influence. I still don't get the appeal of Burt Lancaster but he comes off well in contrast to the other actors (well, Corey's good). I liked his character. My favourite part of the movie is when Astor's character, Fritzi, tries to arrange a marriage between him and Paula in the hopes of steering her into a life away from the casino. Even though Lancaster's character is in love with Paula, he sabotages the whole thing. He wants Paula but he doesn't want it as some kind of business relationship with her mother. Good man.
Desert Fury is available on The Criterion Channel as part of their Vacation Noir playlist. Though no-one's really on vacation in this one.
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