you can always go home
again
by Douglas Messerli
Robert Rossen and A. I. Bezzerides
(uncredited) (screenplay, based on a novel by Ramona Stewart), Lewis Allen
(director) Desert Fury / 1947
Desert Fury
(1947) is a hothouse of a movie comparable to Douglas Sirk’s later Written
on the Wind (1956), this film shot in Technicolor by Edward Cronjager and
Charles Lang with scenes of stunning desert landscape and intense melodramatic
encounters within bedrooms, living rooms, and offices accompanied by the
constantly swelling strains of a score of Miklós Rózsa. And indeed British-born
director Lewis Allen’s credentials (The Uninvited, reviewed elsewhere in
these pages, The Unseen, and The Imperfect Lady of the same year)
with his film’s mix of soap-opera, mystery, and ghost film genres puts him very
much into the same context with figures such Sirk, Nicholas Ray, and others.
Desert
Fury contains elements of all three genres, particularly the first. But it
quickly becomes a mystery when, without apparent reason, the film begins with
the sudden return of two of the desert town Chuckawalla, Nevada’s natives,
Paula Haller (Lizabeth Scott) and Eddie Bendix (John Hodiak), Paula seemingly
in a hurry to get home and Eddie stopping by a bridge—where we later discover
his wife was killed in an automobile accident—not sure whether he really wants
to settle back into Chuckawalla life. But then
neither is Paula sure she wants to return permanently to a town where most of
the girls her age look down on her for her mother Fritzi’s activities as the
owner of the Purple Sage, the local gambling establishment.
Paula has just left yet another school to which her mother has sent her
to become a refined and educated young lady, but the beautiful woman wants
nothing to do with refinement nor, apparently, with becoming wiser. If she
misses the fresh air of the desert and, just perhaps, the company of the local
sheriff Tom Hanson (Burt Lancaster), her real draw, whom she’d most love to
escape, is her mother Fritzi (Mary Astor), who is so powerful as a kind of
amazon force that even she feels safe in the fact that her daughter will never
truly be able to leave her. It is hardly coded if we feel we can describe her
mother—who, we later discover, often slept with her daughter when she was a
child—as having something close to a lesbian relationship with her offspring.
Without a father —who has apparently died, perhaps murdered, when Paula was an
infant—the daughter has been so overpowered by her mother’s love for and
definition of her that the two have developed love and hate relationships that
go far beyond the confines of a mother-daughter affair.
Eddie also arrives with someone upon whom he is utterly dependent, his
“friend” Johnny Ryan (Wendell Corey) who has been with him for most of his life
and with whom he soon perceive that he is so intricately intertwined that once
again you could hardly describe their relationship as coded. When Paula, later
in the film, asks Eddie how he met Johnny, the gangster replies:
“’It was in the automat off Times Square,
about two o'clock in the morning on a Saturday. I was broke, he had a couple of
dollars, we got to talking. He ended up paying for my ham and eggs.’ ‘And then?’
Paula asks? ‘I went home with him that night. We were together from then on.’”
You
don’t describe “going home with someone” if you’re intending to sleep on their
living room couch for a few days, and you don’t stay together with someone for
most of your life if there isn’t something more than a relationship with a
“best buddy” or “close advisor” going on. And when we later discover that even
while he was married to the woman who everyone reports looked a lot like Paula,
Johnny still lived with him, I think we can safely report that the connection
between Johnny and Eddie is homosexual.
The film, released in 1947, is obviously not openly suggesting that
mother and daughter or Johnny and Eddie are having “sex”—that would be
impossible if you wanted to have your film screened, and this work, produced by
Hal Wallis Productions and distributed by Paramount Pictures was a true
Hollywood production, so there no escaping the Hays Code in the year I was
born. But as Eddie Muller, San Francisco film critic who as authored several
books on Hollywood cinema, particularly noir films, observes: "Desert
Fury is the gayest movie ever produced in Hollywood's golden era. The film
is saturated—with incredibly lush color, fast and furious dialogue dripping
with innuendo, double entendres, dark secrets, outraged face-slappings,
overwrought Miklos Rosza violins. How has this film escaped revival or cult
status? It's Hollywood at its most gloriously berserk."
And
yes, Johnny is a gangster who apparently hooked up for a while with Fritzi back
in the old New Jersey days before she had to move West for her mysterious (the
film never reveals its nature) illness. But why Robert Rossen and A. I.
Bezzerides’ screenplay keeps suggesting that Paula has an uncanny resemblance
to the former Mrs. Bendix is inexplicable. Are the writers somehow signaling
that the relationship between Fritzi and Eddie was deeper than they want to
outwardly proclaim, that the other woman was, preposterously, an older sister
of Paula’s? Was incest also one of Eddie’s crimes?
All
we can know from what Fritzi tells Paula and what her sheriff friend Tom hints
is that Eddie is no good and dangerous for a pretty girl who is still “wet
behind the ears”—and here we are entering Written on the Wind territory—which
is, of course, why she immediately falls in love with him.
In
movies like Allen’s and later, Sirk’s and Ray’s films, good girls never fall in
love with the right man, which is what gets the pot of the plot into such a
boiling frenzy. As bad and controlling as she is, as “too-good-to-be-believed”
as he is, Fritzi and Tom cannot keep the rebel Paula locked away in her
bedroom for long. As she keeps repeating, she’s got her mother’s bad behavior
in her blood and she’s just naturally attracted to evil gay gangsters like
Eddie.
Even Johnny’s abuse and open abhorrence of the potential home-breaker
doesn’t give her pause, as she weaves the weak Eddie around her finger,
demanding that he get rid of his “life-long friend.” When Eddie finally does
get around to telling his lover to get lost, it is utterly clear that the idea
is incomprehensible to Johnny. While realizing that Eddie may have romantically
fallen for Paula, he insists he will still hang around. But when Eddie tells
him he actually has to leave the premises, the look on Johnny’s face is one of
utter confusion and terror at the same instant, a kind of sickness until death.
Finally, when the true mystery is revealed, when Johnny, no longer
caring enough to try to protect Eddie or himself, tells Paula the truth—that
Eddie does not truly exist but is a weak puppet manipulated and given
credibility as a human being entirely by Johnny—we feel almost as foolish as
Paula for not having realized that the passive aggression we observed in
Johnny’s demeanor which defined the two men’s existence together.
Having now broken the Hays Code restrictions, revealing the true nature
of the way the two men actually functioned as a couple, the script has to
destroy the queers. There is no way around it: Eddie shoots Johnny dead and
runs himself—in a pretend chase to bring back Paula—off the same bridge which
he has previously forced the look-alike Paula’s car.
So now Paula no longer needs to leave her mamma. She can stay right in
Chuckawalla, or at least nearby in the farm Tom Hanson has always wanted, with
her as his forever happy wife. Order is returned without even having to cut the
proverbial apron strings. And since Tom is well-liked by everyone in town, we
can be certain that eventually Paula will become a scion of Chuckawalla
society, just what her mother wanted for her, and even at one point in this
fable, attempted to buy for her daughter.
Peyton Place has never looked better.
Los Angeles, July 18, 2021
Reprinted from World Cinema Review and My
Queer Cinema blog (July 2021).
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
