Noirvember Watch: Desert Fury (1947)

Watched:  11/1/2024

Format:  Criterion

Viewing:  First

Director:  Lewis Allen

Well, I'm not sure I started Noirvember 2024 with a bang, but I did finally check this one off the list.

First - yes, this thing is in color, and maybe worth seeing a 1947 crime film shot in vivid, even lurid, color.  See Lizabeth Scott's golden locks!  Marvel at the color of Mary Astor's pants!  (No, really, it's a pretty movie and maybe worth a watch just for that.)  But the minute people start talking in what is supposed to be snappy crime-drama dialog, you kind of know you're in trouble.  It's mostly non-sequiturs and stern declarations.

To me, Desert Fury (1947) is a bit of a melodramatic slog, and hinges on a protagonist hurling herself into bad ideas so often, while offering no sympathetic or redeeming qualities (other than a stellar wardrobe), it's hard to get, here in 2024, what we're supposed to like about her.  The motivation of the criminals in the movie is murky - and why they're even in the little desert oasis just feels like incompetence on someone's part.  

The set-up is that a clearly mid-20's Lizabeth Scott (playing 19 here and looking 32) returns home from quitting another finishing school.*  She wants to come work at her mother's casino so she can make a ton of cash and lord it over the judgey people of her hometown.  Not a bad plan.  On the way into town, she comes across John Hodiak and Wendell Corey, a pair of crooks.  A very young Burt Lancaster plays the town Deputy and soda bottle seller?  I never figured out what was happening.

Mary Astor, who looks like an older cousin to Scott (only 15 years older but looking maybe 7), plays her mother.  She's obviously the best actor in this by a country mile, playing a tough-girl from a rough background who made it big out west.  They live in an amazing mansion.  But Mary Astor basically wants for Scott to marry a nice-boy and join polite society and get away from her frankly very awesome-looking life of running a casino.

Hodiak and Corey have returned to the small town to sort of lay low and do some gambling at Mary Astor's casino.  Why?  It's unclear.  Hodiak is still recovering from the death of his wife that occurred in this one-horse-town.  So why they came back is anyone's guess.

Scott falls for Hodiak for absolutely no reason other than everyone tells her not to.  Just as she does everything just because someone told her not to - no matter how stupid that thing appears to be.  Men fall for her because she's the only sexually available woman in the movie, so Lancaster thinks she's swell, and Hodiak hurls himself at her.

Very, very clearly Hodiak and Corey are supposed to be in a gay relationship, and we learn that Hodiak was previously married to a woman - Scott's doppelganger - who wound up dead under mysterious circumstances.  And STILL Scott is like "I don't care!  I love his tiny mustache!".  

Things come to a head because everyone in this is kind of dumb, and the movie ends as you'd expect.

I'm just not a Lizabeth Scott fan.  She's fine.  She's not annoying when playing a well-written character.  But in an era littered with other actors I like, she doesn't move the needle for me as a plus for watching a film.  My understanding is that producer Hal B. Wallis was deeply in love with her, it ended up destroying him, and there's probably an interesting movie in there.

The movie was... okay.  From a "what's actually happening versus what we got past the censors" this movie is pretty amazing.  From a "do I like these characters or care about what's happening?" the movie was a bust for me.  I can take convoluted plots and characters making mistakes, even walking right into a bad idea for money or sex, but I'm not sure this one pulls it off enough that I care.  

*I finally read up on what finishing school was, and the past is a fascinating and foreign land