Alleged to be the "gayest film every produced in mainstream Hollywood," Desert Fury (1948) is a baffling, ultimately ineffective movie that straddles genres -- it has something of the frenzied melodrama of a Sirk picture like Written on the Wind, overtly perverse and produced in gorgeous, flamboyant technicolor in a witch's brew of film noir (crime) and Western elements. Robert Rossen wrote the script with the uncredited A. I. Bassarides, a noir specialist, and the dialogue is tense, aggressively adversarial, and rank with pulp-fiction exuberance. In some ways, the picture is similar to Sam Fuller's Forty Guns (1957) with Barbara Stanwyck playing a cartoonishly dominant woman and Johnny Guitar (1954) Nick Ray's version of the same Black Widow theme -- in this case, with Joan Crawford playing the part of the devouring, imperious female. The point that my readers should notice is that the bizarre content of Desert Fury precedes these films by several years -- and Sirk's great romantic melodramas were also produced after Desert Fury presumably baffled audiences. In reality, the film is sui generis and, when it was made, it explored territory that no one had previously dared -- except, perhaps, some outlier pictures made in the Weimar Republic just before Hitler put an end to cinematic invention in Germany.
First, and foremost, Desert Fury is spectacularly beautiful -- the new blu-ray DVD does justice to the fantastic technicolor cinematography by the great Charles Lang. An example from the outset of the film may be illustrative: we see an Old West landscape with sandstone buttes and towering mesas with red and yellow cliffs. But, instead of a cowboy, the film shows a car wending it's way through the desert. In the car are two odd-looking men, dresssed in more or less identical suits that 'code' them as gangsters. The shots in the car are stylized, relying heavily on unconvincing but completely luscious rear-projection. (It took Hans-Jurgen Syberberg to educate us as to the exquisite and surreal beauty of rear-projection effects -- but once we have become attuned to that aesthetic (from films like Karl May and Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King) we return to films like Vertigo and Desert Fury with an eye trained to enjoy this effect which is purely and intrinsically cinematic. The gangsters stop at a narrow single-lane bridge that leads to a village called Chuckawalla, a place marked by two huge smelter stacks, a bit like Anaconda, Montana, a mining town, although these towering chimneys don't really lead anywhere -- Chuckawalla's industry is gambling, the business that the dominatrix Fritzie (Mary Astor) operates on Main Street, an enterprise that has corrupted the entire place. (In the film's oneiric logic the two smelter towers has something to do with the twin phalluses -- phalloi? -- of the gangster Eddie and his boyfriend/henchman, Johnny.) As the crooks are contemplating the dry arroyo under the bridge, a place where a fatal car crash occurred, a horn honks. We have seen a maroon sedan with wood sides following the gangsters. This is occupied by Paula Heller, the film's heroine played by the resplendent Lizabeth Scott. From the crooks gazing into the ravine, the film cuts to a close-up of the heroine so flattered by the camera that the image almost knocks you down -- it's one of those transcendent glamour shots that are so fabulously beautiful that they push the film off-track, for a moment, into some zone of strange, erotic reverie. The action seems to be set in the red- or slick-rock desert near Sedona and the landscapes are, also, fabulously beautiful -- too pretty to be true.
Desert Fury cloaks itself in beauty but the story is fairly squalid. Paula is a rebel, 19 years old, and she has been kicked out of college. The people in Chuckawalla disdain her because of her mother's business, the local casino. Returning to town, Paula renews her romance with the town's assistant sheriff, Tom, played by Burt Lancaster. When Paula's mother offers to pay Tom with a ranch that he covets if he will marry the rebellious girl, the cop, a washed-up rodeo star, takes umbrage and with Paula in tow confronts Fritzie (Paula's mother) with her offer. This offends Paula and she commences a romance with the thug who has just come to town, Eddie (John Hodiak). There's several problems with Paula's nascent romance with Eddie -- Eddie's henchman, Johnny, (played by Wendell Corey in his first role) is in love with Eddie and living with him as his wife. Johnny resents being displaced in Eddie's affections. Paula and Fritzie fight and we learn that Fritzie had a love-affair years ago with Eddie. (There's a kinky suggestion that Paula is, in fact, Eddie's daughter.) Fritzie vetoes the relationship which causes Eddie and Paula to elope, driving toward Las Vegas to get married in that place. Johnny is hitchhiking and he stops the vehicle in which Eddie and Paula are riding. The couple, with the enraged and psychotically jealous Johnny stop at a road house in the middle of nowhere. Johnny harangues the couple about his love and loyalty to Eddie which leads to a fight and Eddie gunning down his boyfriend. Tom, the local cop, stops the lovers on the way to Las Vegas -- by this point, Paula has finally figured out what is obvious to all, namely that Eddie is, at least, bisexual if not actively homosexual and that he urged Johnny to murder his first wife, the woman who died in the arroyo when her car was forced off the road. There's a nocturnal (day for night) car chase -- Eddie's vehicle plunges off the highway at the fatal bridge leading into Chuckawalla and he dies. Tom and Paula walk into the dawn on the narrow bridge that presumably leads to some kind of marriage between them and an ostensibly happy ending. All of this is performed with a maximum of histrionic acting -- lots of people get their face slapped in this picture. (The number of face-slapping scenes inevitably reminds me of Guy Maddin's flamboyantly gay short film, Sissy Boy Slap Party.) The film is noteworthy for the number of romantic triangles that it posits, all of them revolving around the universal object of desire, John Hodiak's Eddie -- an oddly lackluster and unattractive leading man: his eyes are too closely placed and his hair is slicked back in an unappealing way and his head seems oddly shaped: it's impossible to figure out why everyone is in love with him: the guy is grumpy and churlish to boot. Fritzie has loved Eddie and is competing with her daughter for his affections. Tom loves Paula who loves Eddie (at least, thinks she loves Eddie). Johnny loves Eddie who is taken from him by Paula.
Like many cult films, Desert Fury is more fun to discuss than to watch. It's actually a fairly lugubrious and tedious vehicle, notwithstanding the gorgeous visuals and the snappy dialogue. The DVD commentary on the film by Imogene Sara Smith is better than the movie and, indeed, an excellent accompaniment to the picture. But that commentary is uniquely weird also -- the speaker recorded her words, which she reads off sheets of paper that you can hear rustling, in a room right next to an elevated train. Every five to eight minutes, you hear everything rumble and the apartment shakes with the sound of whatever it is that is passing;. Nonetheless, the commentary is very good and Smith seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of both film noir and fifties melodrama. Desert Fury is so far ahead of it's time that it doesn't seem to occupy any plausible era at all. Either it's a bizarre failure or a remarkable and prophetic film.
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