Entry tags:
Why is it women never fall in love with me?
Fifty-five years ago, Wendell Corey drank himself to death at the age of fifty-four and I'm still sore at him about it. In honor of his yahrzeit, I finally decided to watch the film in which he made his screen debut, Lewis Allen's Desert Fury (1947). I wish I could have sat Wittgenstein down in front of this movie some afternoon when he needed a Technicolor shower bath for his brain. Fellas, it is gay.
Desert Fury does not come from the future. Cast with contract players, lit and shot in accordance with classical continuity, constructed around the expectations and fulfillment of melodrama within the cordons of the Production Code, it is legibly and inescapably a high-end programmer from the Hollywood studio system of the late '40's, specifically Paramount where Hal Wallis was assembling and showcasing a stock company of his discoveries. It just also feels as though it emerged from some oneiric hothouse where everything from the line readings to the color of the rufous earth is flatter, lusher, more banal, more perverse than even the average film noir, Western, or Gothic. Should your definitions of queerness incline toward excess, artifice, desires unclassifiable, non-normative, and skew-whiff, this picture will clear the bar like a green carnation. DPs Charles Lang and Edward Cronjager lend the same super-saturation to the syrup-gold of Lizabeth Scott's hair as the sucked-plum gloss of her Chrysler convertible, the pastel-sunned awnings of the small-town main street of Chuckawalla and the ultramarine overcast of its cloud-crammed day-for-night. The mise-en-scène pops like a stereoscope between location shots and rear projections of same, studio interiors as expertly dressed as magazine spreads and exteriors fragmented between the Arizona storefronts of Cottonwood and the California gingerbread of the Piru Mansion. The costume changes are as gratuitous as the continually flourishing strings by Miklós Rózsa, a rose-pink hair ribbon in a midnight thunderstorm. As escalated to the screen by Robert Rossen and an uncredited A.I. Bezzerides from the serialized source material of Ramona Stewart's Desert Town (1945), the plot purports to chart the coming of age of the headstrong, stifled Paula Haller (Scott) as she negotiates between the familiar affection of deputy sheriff Tom Hanson (Burt Lancaster) and the more dangerous mysteries of out-of-town racketeer Eddie Bendix (John Hodiak), complicated from both directions by the possessiveness of her deep-pocketed queenpin of a mother, Fritzi (Mary Astor), and the hostility of her new flame's longtime companion, Johnny Ryan (Corey), but in practice its action is repetitious to the point of ritual, a face-slapping, a slamming out of the house, a furious drive in a car that never seems to get anywhere, racing the straightaway between the sandstone bands of the mountains as though the fateful truss bridge at the town limits were an event horizon. Until a final detonation of secrets blows the pattern apart, its vivid thinness may be the practical result of paring the more communal novel down to its central actors, but it locks the film even further into its dreamlike, fetishistic structure of intersecting triangles around whose points the characters are flung by the gravity of their needs and fantasies. "This is what I like," Paula explains as she sits on a split-railed fence at the ranch where Eddie and Johnny are staying, the latter having pointedly absented himself to take care of the housework, "to be alone on the desert, with the sagebrush and the sky." Under this overheated cyclorama of a firmament, good luck.
From the first hit of its tempestuous theme over red-brushed, yucca-backed titles, I was not surprised that this film has both a camp cult and serious champions; Astor alone could attract both as the butch, imperious Fritzi who runs the town where a decade ago she came west for her health like her own small-scale Vegas, greeting her glamorous daughter with the casual, appraising, "You look good to me, baby, even when you're tired," watching her go with a world-weary snap of the fingers: "Nineteen years, like that." Loose-limbed in flowing slacks, she's never more jeweled and femme than when she bids to buy her daughter into respectability with a marriage to the clean-cut Tom, sweetening the deal for the former rodeo star with the dowry of a ranch. "I like to keep my amateur standing," the leather-jacketed deputy demurs. The film never does make much beyond echoes of the agreement that Paula looks far more like Eddie's late wife than her own mother, but it leans so hard into her habit of calling the toughly elegant older woman by name, treated to shopping trips and admired like arm candy in front of third parties, into Fritzi's offer on the night of the thunderstorm to sleep with the tear-tossed girl who has just been kissed for the first time by the forbidden awakening of Eddie Bendix and threatened for the first time by the lean, cold-eyed man who lives with him, that while I wouldn't have wanted the Breen office to scream sex perversion and slap down whatever weird partials Astor was layering into the maternal mix, I am not quite sure how it failed to hear them. Then again, no one clocked Corey.
Fourth-billed, the role of Johnny Ryan would never have been star-making despite the prestige of an introducing credit, but it is a hell of a calling card for a character specialist: coiled and mesmerizing, stone cold and queer to the bone. Nothing much in his early scenes distinguishes him from the traditional muscle in waiting at his big shot's shoulder, cracking wise about coppers, placating the testier instincts of the sharp-dressed, dark-mustached man he shadows, but there's something about him that a goon's role doesn't explain, a watchfulness in his ice-clear eyes and the aerodynamically sharp planes of his face. He cooks and cleans like a housewife, takes orders like a soldier, attends like a personal trainer on the bare-chested, sunbathing Eddie, as mindful as a manager of the other man's reputation in the rackets after a recent bad break in Vegas. "Why would there be some of me apart from Eddie?" he returns like a riddle when Paula queries their closeness which seems to leave no room for any interests or aspirations original to Johnny. He smiles as if in the same confidence of a private joke when she challenges him recklessly, outright: "He won't leave me. I come in too handy." Working under the hood of their battered sage-green 1946 DeSoto Custom, oil-sweated in a white undershirt with his dark hair greased back, he has a hustler's delinquent look, although according to the history Eddie relates to a fascinated Paula, the pick-up went the other way:
"I was your age, maybe a year older. 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 . . . I went home with him that night. I was locked out, didn't have a place to stay. His old lady ran a boarding house in the Bronx. There were a couple of vacant rooms. We were together from then on."
Times Square, for the love of Chip Delany. Fifteen years later, the scrupulous detail of the separate rooms has given way to the bachelor clutter of the Halverson ranch where Eddie jokes about his sleeping habits, after Paula's sharp glance at the rumpled, unmade bed—"I curl up like a kitten." One of Johnny's shirts is hanging off the windowsill on the other side. Catching her domestically clearing up, another moment of interrupted rapport with Eddie, he takes the stack of old newspapers and emptied ashtrays out of her hands with the dry, meaningful, "You shouldn't do that, kid. First thing you know, I'll be out of a job." It is not an untroubled arrangement. Despite or because of Johnny's all-round attentions, Eddie treats him with brusque presumption, slaps him as often and more demeaningly than Fritzi slaps Paula, gestures of dominance bristling with insecurities which Johnny's submissiveness seems to feed as much as allay, especially the times it feels more like tolerance than capitulation, biding his third wheel's time as he's done through previous infatuations, even the marriage to Angela which ended through the railing of the Chuckawalla bridge. The mode in which he is brazenly rude to Paula is commonly designated as catty when exchanged between women, but his threat to kill her if she doesn't get away from his man isn't just claws out: a hard-hollowed mask of lamplight in the crack of the frame, he looks like he'll do it if he doesn't slam the door between them. Few of Corey's characters had that tense solidity of violence; it's impressive that it didn't type him as a hood. And yet isn't the part in keeping with his later, heterosexual specialty in romantic losers? Already serving a breakfast for three, he has to listen to himself not just dumped by Eddie before he can drink his coffee, but fruitlessly pleading to stay on even without his cut, his eyes flickering with sudden sick defeat to the blonde girl watching over her cigarette with a defiance of triumph she isn't quite grown enough to conceal, though she has enough pity on the newly odd man out to hold up the dark fairy tale of their escape from Chuckawalla long enough to let a stranded Johnny collect his suitcase and join them as far as the nearest train station, chauffeuring the fugitive couple, as Eddie callously stipulates, to "earn his ride." With her first misgivings about the man she's eloping with, Paula draws the dot-to-dot parallel herself: "I hope you never get finished with me . . . I'd hate to be left alone on a desert road at night."
As Desert Fury shifts between genres as polymorphously as its characters between expressions of desire, its Gothic elements position Eddie Bendix as a hero, the demon true lover who will come for Paula in the face of all obstacles from a devouring mother to a murderous rival to the territorial law, his attraction compounded of his power, his need, and above all his secrets, the worst of which Paula imagines she has already fathomed with the revelation that her choice of husband was once her mother's lover, back in their bootlegging days in Jersey "when he first started out to double-cross the world." The truth turns out to be weirder and even more incestuous, a controlled demolition accomplished over uneaten hamburgers and a Colt Model 1903 in the transient, Hopper-lit theater of an all-night roadside café. "Two people can't fit into one life," Paula once coaxed Johnny, receiving for her pains only the derisive reply, "You seem to think so." He was telling her the truth, as in fact he always did. The commanding, ruthless high-roller of Eddie Bendix is a fiction, a simulacrum, a Cyrano fusion of one man's slick surface with the smarts and nerve and ambition of the other who was always there to pick up the pieces, get his hands dirty, take the rap. "He ain't ever been able to pay the piper. That's where I come in—I pay for him." Spilling the tea of their merged, crime-stained life, Johnny seems to be taking a bitterly giddy revenge on all three of them trapped at the checkered little table, Eddie for his weakness, Paula for her gullibility, and himself for fifteen years of devotion to a man who would have discarded him without even the sarcastic pension of a gold watch. "Sure, I made you do everything," he mocks Eddie's backpedaling protest that the killing of his wife wasn't really his fault, "you couldn't even tie your own shoelaces!" Before our eyes and a horrified Paula's, all the charm and mastery peels off Eddie and the self-effacing Johnny becomes for once impossible to look away from, as magical and fatal a polarization as a knife in a portrait's heart. It produces an effect not found on the page: Johnny Ryan in the novel is a genuinely charmless character, physically offputting, emotionally lightless, lending credence to the notion that he would have needed a front man with the class and charisma of the novel's Eddie Benedict. Corey with his sardonic mouth, his skeptical brows, his dry and dancing voice doesn't strike the viewer as such cellophane that he couldn't have made it on his own in a tough, talkative profession, as his show-stopping scene-stealing proves. If he dedicated himself to making a success of Hodiak's Eddie, it's much harder to believe it wasn't, once upon a time, for love. "It's funny, ain't it?" he muses in his diamond-cut irony of an exit line. "People think they're seeing Eddie and all these years they've been really seeing me. I'm Eddie Bendix. Why is it women never fall in love with me?" The kicker is that Paula did, as she will admit to her mother from the vantage of the broken-railed bridge where her own wrecked car smolders, driven by Eddie to the same death as his wife by the taunting, haunting echo of Johnny, topping from the bottom to the last: "Everything I thought was his was really Johnny's. I had it backwards all the time." In a movie where a girl's romantic dream turns out to be a queer man's drag, it feels only fitting that the heteronormative tie-off which sets her and her socially appropriate partner walking arm in arm into an eerily foreclosed future of married ranching should be sealed by a kiss—from her mother, on the lips. Since I have side-eyed the deployment of Scott in previous Paramount noirs, I should state for the record that she is more than decorative in Desert Fury; she has to handle a tricky mix of experience and innocence, matter-of-factly versed in her mother's businesses of vice and dangerously naive about the human factors including herself, and if she does not strike out as successfully on her own as the novel's Paula, at least she leaves some impression of growing up. She does look as splendid by real sunlight as the false illuminations of apricot fire-glow and indigo-timed night. I just don't believe she kisses Lancaster once.
It would be unfair, albeit almost irresistible, to subtitle any serious consideration of Corey's screen persona The Art of Losing. He excelled at the less heroic emotions, but he was compelling and credible wherever he fetched up in the audience's sympathy, he had a chameleon's invaluable near-miss of conventional looks and a voice as good as radio to play against them, and it continues to amaze me that he was signed direct from the original Broadway production of Elmer Rice's Dream Girl (1945) because not once in his screen career was he cast as such a successful leading man of romantic comedy as Clark Redfield, the brash aspiring sportswriter who makes his entrance under a stack of ARCs which he cheerfully admits he never reads before reviewing and doesn't win the heroine's heart so much as he accidentally bickers his way into it, a tethering jolt of realism for her fantasies and never quite as authentically cynical as he likes to make out. I would give a lot for a time machine and a ticket to the Coronet Theatre. Hollywood did not have such a surfeit of shape-changers of his caliber that he could afford to wash out after an effective decade of film and a Z-grade epilogue whose titles depress me. I know little about his life, the majority of it from his chapter in Karen Burroughs Hannsberry's Bad Boys: The Actors of Film Noir (2003). He was born in Dracut, raised in East Longmeadow and Springfield, acted with his wife at the Copley Theatre in Boston. I have always hoped that both of these interviews contain more truth than publicity, because who doesn't like dry stone walls and weird faces? He was not actually descended, as often claimed, from John Adams, but thanks to the gene puddle of colonial Newburyport, he looks like a distant relation of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch. Either way, he might not have appreciated my observing his yahrzeit, but in the same way that I don't get to yell at him about his liver, he doesn't get to gripe about how delightful I find it that BAMF Style devoted a column to his look in Desert Fury—the signet ring seems to have belonged to the actor, as I have never seen him in a role without it—and a full decade before it made any difference to me, he got a repertory series of his own from the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. I have still not seen him at the end of his tenure with Paramount in Loving You (1957), but it's on my list because Boyd McDonald, in Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to Oldies on TV (1985/2015), rates Corey highly as "an inspiring example of how a man . . . can be alluring despite the fact that he is 43 years old and, worse, a Republican." If he was not himself allured by men offscreen, he gave a damn fine imitation of it on. Should you wish to sample his contributions to the unstable cocktail of Desert Fury, it is shockingly unavailable to stream legally, but Kino Lorber can do you the Blu-Ray/DVD. I was not sure what to expect from its legendarily queer reputation, but it's the real, elusive, subversive deal. "We've been together a long time." This love brought to you by my handy backers at Patreon.
Desert Fury does not come from the future. Cast with contract players, lit and shot in accordance with classical continuity, constructed around the expectations and fulfillment of melodrama within the cordons of the Production Code, it is legibly and inescapably a high-end programmer from the Hollywood studio system of the late '40's, specifically Paramount where Hal Wallis was assembling and showcasing a stock company of his discoveries. It just also feels as though it emerged from some oneiric hothouse where everything from the line readings to the color of the rufous earth is flatter, lusher, more banal, more perverse than even the average film noir, Western, or Gothic. Should your definitions of queerness incline toward excess, artifice, desires unclassifiable, non-normative, and skew-whiff, this picture will clear the bar like a green carnation. DPs Charles Lang and Edward Cronjager lend the same super-saturation to the syrup-gold of Lizabeth Scott's hair as the sucked-plum gloss of her Chrysler convertible, the pastel-sunned awnings of the small-town main street of Chuckawalla and the ultramarine overcast of its cloud-crammed day-for-night. The mise-en-scène pops like a stereoscope between location shots and rear projections of same, studio interiors as expertly dressed as magazine spreads and exteriors fragmented between the Arizona storefronts of Cottonwood and the California gingerbread of the Piru Mansion. The costume changes are as gratuitous as the continually flourishing strings by Miklós Rózsa, a rose-pink hair ribbon in a midnight thunderstorm. As escalated to the screen by Robert Rossen and an uncredited A.I. Bezzerides from the serialized source material of Ramona Stewart's Desert Town (1945), the plot purports to chart the coming of age of the headstrong, stifled Paula Haller (Scott) as she negotiates between the familiar affection of deputy sheriff Tom Hanson (Burt Lancaster) and the more dangerous mysteries of out-of-town racketeer Eddie Bendix (John Hodiak), complicated from both directions by the possessiveness of her deep-pocketed queenpin of a mother, Fritzi (Mary Astor), and the hostility of her new flame's longtime companion, Johnny Ryan (Corey), but in practice its action is repetitious to the point of ritual, a face-slapping, a slamming out of the house, a furious drive in a car that never seems to get anywhere, racing the straightaway between the sandstone bands of the mountains as though the fateful truss bridge at the town limits were an event horizon. Until a final detonation of secrets blows the pattern apart, its vivid thinness may be the practical result of paring the more communal novel down to its central actors, but it locks the film even further into its dreamlike, fetishistic structure of intersecting triangles around whose points the characters are flung by the gravity of their needs and fantasies. "This is what I like," Paula explains as she sits on a split-railed fence at the ranch where Eddie and Johnny are staying, the latter having pointedly absented himself to take care of the housework, "to be alone on the desert, with the sagebrush and the sky." Under this overheated cyclorama of a firmament, good luck.
From the first hit of its tempestuous theme over red-brushed, yucca-backed titles, I was not surprised that this film has both a camp cult and serious champions; Astor alone could attract both as the butch, imperious Fritzi who runs the town where a decade ago she came west for her health like her own small-scale Vegas, greeting her glamorous daughter with the casual, appraising, "You look good to me, baby, even when you're tired," watching her go with a world-weary snap of the fingers: "Nineteen years, like that." Loose-limbed in flowing slacks, she's never more jeweled and femme than when she bids to buy her daughter into respectability with a marriage to the clean-cut Tom, sweetening the deal for the former rodeo star with the dowry of a ranch. "I like to keep my amateur standing," the leather-jacketed deputy demurs. The film never does make much beyond echoes of the agreement that Paula looks far more like Eddie's late wife than her own mother, but it leans so hard into her habit of calling the toughly elegant older woman by name, treated to shopping trips and admired like arm candy in front of third parties, into Fritzi's offer on the night of the thunderstorm to sleep with the tear-tossed girl who has just been kissed for the first time by the forbidden awakening of Eddie Bendix and threatened for the first time by the lean, cold-eyed man who lives with him, that while I wouldn't have wanted the Breen office to scream sex perversion and slap down whatever weird partials Astor was layering into the maternal mix, I am not quite sure how it failed to hear them. Then again, no one clocked Corey.
Fourth-billed, the role of Johnny Ryan would never have been star-making despite the prestige of an introducing credit, but it is a hell of a calling card for a character specialist: coiled and mesmerizing, stone cold and queer to the bone. Nothing much in his early scenes distinguishes him from the traditional muscle in waiting at his big shot's shoulder, cracking wise about coppers, placating the testier instincts of the sharp-dressed, dark-mustached man he shadows, but there's something about him that a goon's role doesn't explain, a watchfulness in his ice-clear eyes and the aerodynamically sharp planes of his face. He cooks and cleans like a housewife, takes orders like a soldier, attends like a personal trainer on the bare-chested, sunbathing Eddie, as mindful as a manager of the other man's reputation in the rackets after a recent bad break in Vegas. "Why would there be some of me apart from Eddie?" he returns like a riddle when Paula queries their closeness which seems to leave no room for any interests or aspirations original to Johnny. He smiles as if in the same confidence of a private joke when she challenges him recklessly, outright: "He won't leave me. I come in too handy." Working under the hood of their battered sage-green 1946 DeSoto Custom, oil-sweated in a white undershirt with his dark hair greased back, he has a hustler's delinquent look, although according to the history Eddie relates to a fascinated Paula, the pick-up went the other way:
"I was your age, maybe a year older. 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 . . . I went home with him that night. I was locked out, didn't have a place to stay. His old lady ran a boarding house in the Bronx. There were a couple of vacant rooms. We were together from then on."
Times Square, for the love of Chip Delany. Fifteen years later, the scrupulous detail of the separate rooms has given way to the bachelor clutter of the Halverson ranch where Eddie jokes about his sleeping habits, after Paula's sharp glance at the rumpled, unmade bed—"I curl up like a kitten." One of Johnny's shirts is hanging off the windowsill on the other side. Catching her domestically clearing up, another moment of interrupted rapport with Eddie, he takes the stack of old newspapers and emptied ashtrays out of her hands with the dry, meaningful, "You shouldn't do that, kid. First thing you know, I'll be out of a job." It is not an untroubled arrangement. Despite or because of Johnny's all-round attentions, Eddie treats him with brusque presumption, slaps him as often and more demeaningly than Fritzi slaps Paula, gestures of dominance bristling with insecurities which Johnny's submissiveness seems to feed as much as allay, especially the times it feels more like tolerance than capitulation, biding his third wheel's time as he's done through previous infatuations, even the marriage to Angela which ended through the railing of the Chuckawalla bridge. The mode in which he is brazenly rude to Paula is commonly designated as catty when exchanged between women, but his threat to kill her if she doesn't get away from his man isn't just claws out: a hard-hollowed mask of lamplight in the crack of the frame, he looks like he'll do it if he doesn't slam the door between them. Few of Corey's characters had that tense solidity of violence; it's impressive that it didn't type him as a hood. And yet isn't the part in keeping with his later, heterosexual specialty in romantic losers? Already serving a breakfast for three, he has to listen to himself not just dumped by Eddie before he can drink his coffee, but fruitlessly pleading to stay on even without his cut, his eyes flickering with sudden sick defeat to the blonde girl watching over her cigarette with a defiance of triumph she isn't quite grown enough to conceal, though she has enough pity on the newly odd man out to hold up the dark fairy tale of their escape from Chuckawalla long enough to let a stranded Johnny collect his suitcase and join them as far as the nearest train station, chauffeuring the fugitive couple, as Eddie callously stipulates, to "earn his ride." With her first misgivings about the man she's eloping with, Paula draws the dot-to-dot parallel herself: "I hope you never get finished with me . . . I'd hate to be left alone on a desert road at night."
As Desert Fury shifts between genres as polymorphously as its characters between expressions of desire, its Gothic elements position Eddie Bendix as a hero, the demon true lover who will come for Paula in the face of all obstacles from a devouring mother to a murderous rival to the territorial law, his attraction compounded of his power, his need, and above all his secrets, the worst of which Paula imagines she has already fathomed with the revelation that her choice of husband was once her mother's lover, back in their bootlegging days in Jersey "when he first started out to double-cross the world." The truth turns out to be weirder and even more incestuous, a controlled demolition accomplished over uneaten hamburgers and a Colt Model 1903 in the transient, Hopper-lit theater of an all-night roadside café. "Two people can't fit into one life," Paula once coaxed Johnny, receiving for her pains only the derisive reply, "You seem to think so." He was telling her the truth, as in fact he always did. The commanding, ruthless high-roller of Eddie Bendix is a fiction, a simulacrum, a Cyrano fusion of one man's slick surface with the smarts and nerve and ambition of the other who was always there to pick up the pieces, get his hands dirty, take the rap. "He ain't ever been able to pay the piper. That's where I come in—I pay for him." Spilling the tea of their merged, crime-stained life, Johnny seems to be taking a bitterly giddy revenge on all three of them trapped at the checkered little table, Eddie for his weakness, Paula for her gullibility, and himself for fifteen years of devotion to a man who would have discarded him without even the sarcastic pension of a gold watch. "Sure, I made you do everything," he mocks Eddie's backpedaling protest that the killing of his wife wasn't really his fault, "you couldn't even tie your own shoelaces!" Before our eyes and a horrified Paula's, all the charm and mastery peels off Eddie and the self-effacing Johnny becomes for once impossible to look away from, as magical and fatal a polarization as a knife in a portrait's heart. It produces an effect not found on the page: Johnny Ryan in the novel is a genuinely charmless character, physically offputting, emotionally lightless, lending credence to the notion that he would have needed a front man with the class and charisma of the novel's Eddie Benedict. Corey with his sardonic mouth, his skeptical brows, his dry and dancing voice doesn't strike the viewer as such cellophane that he couldn't have made it on his own in a tough, talkative profession, as his show-stopping scene-stealing proves. If he dedicated himself to making a success of Hodiak's Eddie, it's much harder to believe it wasn't, once upon a time, for love. "It's funny, ain't it?" he muses in his diamond-cut irony of an exit line. "People think they're seeing Eddie and all these years they've been really seeing me. I'm Eddie Bendix. Why is it women never fall in love with me?" The kicker is that Paula did, as she will admit to her mother from the vantage of the broken-railed bridge where her own wrecked car smolders, driven by Eddie to the same death as his wife by the taunting, haunting echo of Johnny, topping from the bottom to the last: "Everything I thought was his was really Johnny's. I had it backwards all the time." In a movie where a girl's romantic dream turns out to be a queer man's drag, it feels only fitting that the heteronormative tie-off which sets her and her socially appropriate partner walking arm in arm into an eerily foreclosed future of married ranching should be sealed by a kiss—from her mother, on the lips. Since I have side-eyed the deployment of Scott in previous Paramount noirs, I should state for the record that she is more than decorative in Desert Fury; she has to handle a tricky mix of experience and innocence, matter-of-factly versed in her mother's businesses of vice and dangerously naive about the human factors including herself, and if she does not strike out as successfully on her own as the novel's Paula, at least she leaves some impression of growing up. She does look as splendid by real sunlight as the false illuminations of apricot fire-glow and indigo-timed night. I just don't believe she kisses Lancaster once.
It would be unfair, albeit almost irresistible, to subtitle any serious consideration of Corey's screen persona The Art of Losing. He excelled at the less heroic emotions, but he was compelling and credible wherever he fetched up in the audience's sympathy, he had a chameleon's invaluable near-miss of conventional looks and a voice as good as radio to play against them, and it continues to amaze me that he was signed direct from the original Broadway production of Elmer Rice's Dream Girl (1945) because not once in his screen career was he cast as such a successful leading man of romantic comedy as Clark Redfield, the brash aspiring sportswriter who makes his entrance under a stack of ARCs which he cheerfully admits he never reads before reviewing and doesn't win the heroine's heart so much as he accidentally bickers his way into it, a tethering jolt of realism for her fantasies and never quite as authentically cynical as he likes to make out. I would give a lot for a time machine and a ticket to the Coronet Theatre. Hollywood did not have such a surfeit of shape-changers of his caliber that he could afford to wash out after an effective decade of film and a Z-grade epilogue whose titles depress me. I know little about his life, the majority of it from his chapter in Karen Burroughs Hannsberry's Bad Boys: The Actors of Film Noir (2003). He was born in Dracut, raised in East Longmeadow and Springfield, acted with his wife at the Copley Theatre in Boston. I have always hoped that both of these interviews contain more truth than publicity, because who doesn't like dry stone walls and weird faces? He was not actually descended, as often claimed, from John Adams, but thanks to the gene puddle of colonial Newburyport, he looks like a distant relation of
spatch. Either way, he might not have appreciated my observing his yahrzeit, but in the same way that I don't get to yell at him about his liver, he doesn't get to gripe about how delightful I find it that BAMF Style devoted a column to his look in Desert Fury—the signet ring seems to have belonged to the actor, as I have never seen him in a role without it—and a full decade before it made any difference to me, he got a repertory series of his own from the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. I have still not seen him at the end of his tenure with Paramount in Loving You (1957), but it's on my list because Boyd McDonald, in Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to Oldies on TV (1985/2015), rates Corey highly as "an inspiring example of how a man . . . can be alluring despite the fact that he is 43 years old and, worse, a Republican." If he was not himself allured by men offscreen, he gave a damn fine imitation of it on. Should you wish to sample his contributions to the unstable cocktail of Desert Fury, it is shockingly unavailable to stream legally, but Kino Lorber can do you the Blu-Ray/DVD. I was not sure what to expect from its legendarily queer reputation, but it's the real, elusive, subversive deal. "We've been together a long time." This love brought to you by my handy backers at Patreon.
no subject
that was rude of him. Didn't he know you were waiting to meet him?
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I am yelling at the next dry stone wall in the Pioneer Valley I see.
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no subject
"And some no one from the future remembers that you're gone . . ."
That is one of my favorite Mountain Goats songs. Thank you for that open-air version, which I'd never heard.
no subject
It's possible I'm not remembering this right, but there's a scene near the beginning, I think, when they are driving into town and talking about beer, and Johnny sort of smacks his lips... I wouldn't have thought of this without your review of "The furies" and that cake licking scene, but it feels subtly and quietly suggestive in the context of such a queer movie? And maybe it also flew past the censorship, and it's great!
(If it's useful, I found it on Archive.org. It has Spanish subtitles, but they hopefully won't get in the way too much!)
Delightful indeed! And I like all the bits you've found about him too. The signet ring observation is a sharp one--my eyesight is too bad and I would have never noticed it! XD But it made me curious--I thought it could be a school ring, and while I didn't find any conclusive evidence, some of his yearbooks popped up almost immediately! Look at him!
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Thank you! I made the mistake of thinking that I would not have lots of feelings about this film, including I want to see an IB Tech print of this so hard. It ran on 35 mm last November at the Brattle Theatre and I had no idea. I wouldn't have been able to see it then, but it's funny how just out of reach it's been.
It's been a while since I saw this movie, but I remember really liking it. I loved Lizabeth Scott and Mary Astor, and I don't remember if I mentioned it before, but I think it's one of the movies that first made me seriously notice Wendell Corey.
Understandably! If I'd never heard of him, I would still have been writing about his part and his performance. He's as vivid as the Technicolor.
But I didn't know that this was his first movie, that's even more impressive!
He got good notices for it, too! Quite a lot of the rest of the film did not. I can understand it confusing people in 1947. It reminded me of discovering Tanith Lee.
The gender duality of Johnny's character is so interesting--a traditional sidekick, while also having traits of many noir female characters, including getting slapped. "Fellas, it is gay" sums up the movie very accurately!
I can't believe there's no fic on AO3 for this thing, either. The Venn diagram of people who watch old movies and people who write fanfiction cannot be that small.
It's possible I'm not remembering this right, but there's a scene near the beginning, I think, when they are driving into town and talking about beer, and Johnny sort of smacks his lips... I wouldn't have thought of this without your review of "The furies" and that cake licking scene, but it feels subtly and quietly suggestive in the context of such a queer movie? And maybe it also flew past the censorship, and it's great!
You are remembering correctly and I think you're right about the suggestiveness, too. Thank you for drawing the connection! This entire movie seems to have flown past the censors. I'm not complaining, but I can't figure out how.
(If it's useful, I found it on Archive.org. It has Spanish subtitles, but they hopefully won't get in the way too much!)
Oh, that's great! Thank you so much. I couldn't find it when I was searching earlier, but I am running extremely tired. The subtitles do not detract from the everything else of the movie.
The signet ring observation is a sharp one--my eyesight is too bad and I would have never noticed it!
I'm not sure when I did: after The Accused (1949) and I Walk Alone (1947), I think, and then I started watching for it. Now I'm thinking of Gary Cole in Office Space (1999), wearing his character's sfnal class ring from the recently canceled Crusade (1999) just because he could.
But it made me curious--I thought it could be a school ring, and while I didn't find any conclusive evidence, some of his yearbooks popped up almost immediately! Look at him!
Oh, my God, he's so young and so recognizable and I'm so glad he stopped center-parting his hair, it was doing nothing for him.
(He was in the glee club!)
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I agree, this movie needs a fix-it! And oh, a bunch of old movies got nominated for Yuletide, so I remain hopeful! :D
Oh, my God, he's so young and so recognizable and I'm so glad he stopped center-parting his hair, it was doing nothing for him.
(He was in the glee club!)
And in lots of other things too!
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I saw this year! Three of my favorites by the same person, even. I crashed their comments to thank them and hopefully did not weird them out.
And in lots of other things too!
Okay, what's really funny about that list is he doesn't seem to have done theater.
(Actually, it's neat because it matches the information in Hannsberry. According to a 1946 interview with Corey which she quotes, he didn't go to college—despite, I see, an acceptance to the University of Ohio—because money was so tight with the Depression that he went directly into an assortment of local odd jobs instead and only ended up in a community theater production of Elmer Rice's Street Scene because he had a friend in the cast and they desperately needed someone to play the small dialect role of the Swedish janitor. "No one else wanted the part. So I was selling refrigerators during the day and playing the janitor at night." Within a year he was doing professional theater because it turned out he loved it, but it had not started out as one of his ambitions. Random friend in the Springfield Repertory Players, thank you.)
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It was about the first biographical thing I found out about him after his dates. You see why I feel like yelling.
It sounds like this film would make a great double bill with Johnny Eager.
I want to be able to link them! There are moments in Desert Fury that almost feel like darker, deliberate reflections of the earlier film, and there's enough time between its release and the publication of Desert Town to make it plausible. I just don't know if I have grounds to. But they absolutely should be double-featured and I hope they have.
(The other film that feels closest, although its m/m is less textually detailed and less entangled into the central m/f relationship, is Born to Kill (1947), but the production dates on that one are almost simultaneous with Desert Fury, so it feels less like influence than whatever was in the water at the time.)
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It is remarkably, you should pardon the expression, straight down the line!
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The playbills would be neat to see but the Athenaeum lists their collection as "not intact".
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Dammit, Pike. I hope there are at least photographs. A staircase donated by Gardner has possibilities.
Presumably Corey and his wife worked with the FTP there, quite possibly along with Joseph Cotten, whom the Athenaeum mentions as working there as well.
They did act with the Federal Theatre Project! Hannsberry mentions it (as did some of his obituaries). She doesn't mention which shows.
The playbills would be neat to see but the Athenaeum lists their collection as "not intact".
What does that even mean? Incomplete? They have half of each playbill? I wish archives were easier to get into these days.
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Oh man, absolutely. Luckily, USA archives are pretty good, compared to others, particularly about digital collections. So I followed your Federal Theatre Project mention, and searched the related collection at the LoC, and look, they have playbills from shows he was in!
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Well searched! That definitely looks like some kind of local repertory—tracking the producer-director, he seems have been a Holyoke mainstay. A date on either of those playbills would not have gone amiss, though.
(In return, I can offer a photo of Corey and Betty Field during the original run of Dream Girl, in what looks like one of the real-world rather than daydream sequences, even.)
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And that's a nice photo! Yay archives! <3
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Thank you for running that information down! I just wished the Library of Congress had included it.
Help Yourself is new to me, although it sounds like a proto-How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and I am actively surprised there wasn't a pre-Code film starring Jimmy Cagney, but I have read The Night of January 16th and Corey would have been right in his future wheelhouse as the professional witness of the private eye who's a lot less on the ball than he looks.
And that's a nice photo! Yay archives!
This one's from one of the daydreams. It goes without saying that when Paramount did film Dream Girl in 1948, not only did the story suffer all sorts of changes, neither Corey nor Field were cast in it.
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Hooray! There are copies in the Minuteman library system, if that helps you out.
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sealed by a kiss—from her mother, on the lips --Ayup. More than just gay, that.
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It's a spectacular scene. The film's conclusion is more operatic than the novel's, but I found in this case that I didn't mind.
--Ayup. More than just gay, that.
I don't get to describe that many movies from the studio era as polymorphously perverse, but this one really fits the bill. (The rest are mostly musicals, which Desert Fury would be much less weird if it were.)