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."
( I've been tied up with you too long to go on alone. )
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."
( I've been tied up with you too long to go on alone. )
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.
