Mary Astor’s wardrobe for her tough-talking butch-matriarch in Desert Fury

Let’s hear it for Edith Head’s conception and design of Mary Astor’s wardrobe in Desert Fury (1947) and its elegant-but-decadent-baroque-butch aesthetic.

This Technicolor noir is now streaming on Criterion, and you should see it while it’s there. The film is a rarity. Keith and Dan had a copy of it and hosted a special screening of it for me, Farran, Louis and Imogen – before the pandemic – when life was simpler. I had never seen it before. Neither had Farran. It was glorious.

Wendell Corey makes his debut in Desert Fury, and it’s his first time appearing opposite husky-voiced Lizabeth Scott, who plays a 1940s version of Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause, a college-dropout restless teenager, parent-dominated, and attracted to bad boys. Scott gets between Corey and his longtime boyfriend. The gay relationship is not subtext. It’s right out there in the text. And Astor? … well. She’s obsessed with someone too. And … it’s disturbing. This is also not subtext. It’s obvious, it motivates everything. These actors all knew what they were playing.

Corey is so good, so riveting, as a gay criminal, a born “heavy”, with dead eyes, keeping house while his partner philanders around with women, women Corey cannot bear to have come between them. He’s treated like a house maid and he is over it. His boyfriend needs to choose HIM, not some dame. The two have been together for nigh on thirty years.

The swirling sexual-dynamics and the androgynous sexual-archetypes/personae in Desert Fury almost make the sexually-fluid-fever-dream of Johnny Guitar look picket-fence-conventional, and that’s saying something.

Everyone’s clothes in this are spectacular, it is Edith Head after all, but Astor’s are next level. Check out the sensible sandals in the first outfit. She’s ready to pop across the desert to attend Burning Man and join up with her lesbian drum circle.