La Furie du désert

I've always wondered why Lizabeth Scott never became a big star;part of the reason can be found in the fact that she resembled Lauren Bacall.She plays opposite a bossy Mary Astor and a young Burt Lancaster with whom she would team up again the following year in " I walk alone" .But neither her nor Lancaster have interesting characters in "desert fury".

The real meat lies in the John Hodiak/Wendell Corey relationship.It seems sometimes that Johnny is in love with Eddie and is jealous of the women he woos."He's a bad man,he might have killed his wife " Johnny warns Paula ,but he cannot hide his misogyny and he tells her so:he hates her,and never Eddie will leave HIM for HER.

Probably the most distinguished feature of DESERT FURY is the spectacular Technicolor Paramount lavished on it, a story of personal conflicts among Nevada's gambling set. Another distinguished feature is MARY ASTOR as Fritzi, a hard-boiled dame who runs a gambling establishment and keeps a tight leash on her willful daughter (LIZABETH SCOTT). Scott is strikingly photographed and reminded me of a more animated version of Veronica Lake.

But complications arise when two men pay too much attention to Astor's daughter--JOHN HODIAK (a no good hunk who may or may not have murdered his wife) and BURT LANCASTER as a wary police officer who keeps Lizabeth Scott on his radar at all times.

It's fun as melodrama, nothing more or less, and at times achieves something of a camp classic with Astor's butch performance as she effortlessly steals the film's acting honors. Take it or leave it, it's all in good, steamy fun with lots of fury going on under those hot Technicolor lights.

Back in the forties, when movies touched on matters not yet admissible in "polite" society, they resorted to codes which supposedly floated over the heads of most of the audience while alerting those in the know to just what was up. Probably no film of the decade was so freighted with innuendo as the oddly obscure Desert Fury, set in a small gambling oasis called Chuckawalla somewhere in the California desert. Proprietress of the Purple Sage saloon and casino is the astonishing Mary Astor, in slacks and sporting a cigarette holder; into town drives her handful-of-a-daughter, Lizabeth Scott, looking, in Technicolor, like 20-million bucks. But listen to the dialogue between them, which suggests an older Lesbian and her young, restless companion (one can only wonder if A.I. Bezzerides' original script made this relationship explicit). Even more blatant are John Hodiak as a gangster and Wendell Corey as his insanely jealous torpedo. Add Burt Lancaster as the town sheriff, stir, and sit back. Both Lancaster and (surprisingly) Hodiak fall for Scott. It seems, however, that Hodiak not only has a past with Astor, but had a wife who died under suspicious circumstances. The desert sun heats these ingredients up to a hard boil, with face-slappings aplenty and empurpled exchanges. Don't pass up this hothouse melodrama, chock full of creepily exotic blooms, if it comes your way; it's a remarkable movie.

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)!

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.