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Feb 27, 2019 Web Exclusive By Stephen Danay

Released in 1947 at the height of the post-WWII noir boom, Desert Fury is a film pushing against the boundaries of what was a hugely popular, but still nascent genre. By that point, classics like The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity and The Killers had already established the template for the noir genre: Shadowy black and white photography, morally questionable protagonists, and a preoccupation with the cynicism and alienation engendered by life in urban America. Desert Fury turns many of these tropes on their head, resulting in - for better or for worse - a unique hodgepodge of noir, western and melodrama that’s stranger than the sum of its parts.

Many genre purists would disqualify Desert Fury from its opening frame, which reveals the film to be shot in bright Technicolor, a stylistic choice that would seem antithetical to the aesthetics, the themes, the very name of the noir genre. The film is set in a small town in Nevada, so the color choice provides the sweeping desert vistas with a lush, painted quality - especially on a cleaned-up Blu-ray transfer - but causes the indoor scenes to look more like a stately melodrama than a noir. Given the over-cooked narrative, this is arguably a more appropriate choice. Lizbeth Scott starts as a young woman returning to her home town which is ruled in all but name by her mother, the proprietor of a popular saloon/casino, played by Mary Astor. She becomes involved in a love triangle between a stalwart deputy - Burt Lancaster in one of is earliest roles - and a gangster fleeing from Vegas, played by Lifeboat star John Hodiak.

Lancaster’s charms were obvious but still in their infancy and Scott and Hodiak don’t have the chemistry necessary to carry the torrid romance at the center of the film. The more interesting stuff creeps in from around the edges, specifically in the form of Mary Astor and Wendell Corey, who plays Hodiak’s psychotically devoted right-hand man. Only sixteen years older than the woman playing her daughter, Mary Astor brings a weary dignity to a character that would have made a more appropriate protagonist than Scott’s. With her close cropped bob and florid cigarette holder, she’s every inch the criminal matriarch, but her ability to naturally radiate intelligence and inner turmoil gives the character more layers than she has on the page. Corey’s character is will probably be the most interesting to modern viewers; you can cut the sexual tension between him and Hodiak with a knife. A hulking thug cast as a bitter, nagging nursemaid to his partner, his savage jealously of Lizbeth Scott and lines like “I went home with him that night. We’ve been together for a long time.”, leaves one wondering how such brazenly implied homosexuality made it past censors in the late 1940s. To say nothing of the flirtatious appraisal of her daughter’s looks by the Astor character.

Kino Lorber’s new Blu-ray release of Desert Fury includes an excellent commentary track by Sara Imogen Smith, author of In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City, which does an excellent job of unpacking the film’s sexual preoccupations, as well as its place in the canon of rural noir.

(www.kinolorber.com/product/desert-fury-blu-ray)