Scott was a beautiful actress but in this film, she became increasingly annoying - that is, the teenage character she played was financially supported in style by her mother and spent her days swanning around in cars flirting with men. She was clearly in heat and needed a man to satisfy her physical needs but otherwise, she had no purpose in life. Aside from her looks, she was vapid. The studio dressed her in a wide range of expensive outfits.. on one occasion she was confined to her bedroom and changed her attire no less than three times. The theme of homosexuality has been cited in other posts. I thought that the mother's insistence she was not to marry the crime boss was because he was her father - this would have made the plot more interesting.

This is one of the great crypto-gay B movies of its day. If you take the ridiculous story line at all seriously, it couldn't rate more than a 4. But, if you scratch the almost non-existent veneer, it's definitely worth a 7 for its ability to sustain the ambiguous sexuality of the plot for the full 90 minutes. Can a good girl who knows she likes it bad be happy with bisexuality and incest? Or will censorship and patriarchy force her into submission? It's a festival of bitch slapping, double entendres, guns as phallic symbols and a pigskin glove. Plus, Mary Astor is great as the hard-nosed old gal who talks straight and steers queer. I wish they still made them like this. Kind of makes you miss the days when they had to really work overtime to make gay films.

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.

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.