Desert Fury (1947)

After quitting school, a young girl (Lizabeth Scott) returns to her mother (Mary Astor) who runs a gambling casino in a Nevada desert town. When she becomes involved with a racketeer (John Hodiak), several people including Astor, lawman Burt Lancaster and Hodiak's companion (Wendell Corey) attempt to break up the relationship, all for reasons of their own. One of the rare examples of a genuine film noir in color, the film's desert locations reap the greatest benefit of the Technicolor cinematography courtesy of Charles Lang and Edward Cronjager. The most intriguing aspect of the film is the homoerotic relationship between Hodiak and Corey wherein Corey's obsession with Hodiak and his jealousy over Scott threatens to boil over at any minute and in the film's tense finale, it does. Mary Astor as Scott's unyielding mother gives the best performance but the usually wooden Scott manages to drum up enough enthusiasm to actually give a performance. The assured direction is by Lewis Allen (THE UNINVITED) from a screenplay by Robert Rossen based on the novel by Ramona Stewart. Music by Miklos Rozsa.