Its plot follows the daughter of a casino owner in a small Nevada town who becomes involved with a racketeer who was once suspected of murdering his wife.

The picture was produced by Hal Wallis, with music by Miklós Rózsa and cinematography in Technicolor by Edward Cronjager and Charles Lang.

The film had its world premiere in Salt Lake City in July 1947, and earned mixed reviews from critics.

Gangster Eddie Bendix and his henchman, Johnny Ryan, arrive in the small mining town of Chuckawalla in northern Nevada, where Eddie hopes to cash in on the local community's gambling trade, which is overseen by the powerful Fritzi Haller, owner of the Purple Sage casino.

While leaving town, Paula encounters Eddie at the bridge, and offers him a ride back to the ranch where he is staying with Johnny.

In the years since its release, Desert Fury has been praised as a seminal and unique Hollywood melodrama due to its bold overtones of homosexuality.

[1][2] Film scholar Foster Hirsch wrote: "In a truly subversive move the film jettisons the characters' criminal activities to concentrate on two homosexual couples: the mannish mother who treats her daughter like a lover, and the gangster and his devoted possessive sidekick...  Desert Fury is shot in the lurid, over-saturated colors that would come to define the 1950s melodramas of Douglas Sirk.

The film is saturated—with incredibly lush color, fast and furious dialogue dripping with innuendo, double entendres, dark secrets, outraged face-slappings, overwrought Miklos Rosza violins.

"[4] Writing for Film Comment, Ronald Bergan suggests that it is impossible to discern whether the homosexual undertones in the relationship between Eddie and Johnny were "intended or inadvertent...

Since Vito Russo’s 1981 book The Celluloid Closet, we have grown accustomed to reading cryptic messages of homosexuality in pre-Sixties Hollywood movies.

Additional exteriors were shot in Palmdale,[11] as well as the Arizona cities of Clarkdale and Cottonwood, the latter of which was entirely leased by the production for filming, and included local residents as extras.

[13] Released by Paramount Pictures, the film had its world premiere in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, July 23, 1947, with principal stars Burt Lancaster and Lizabeth Scott in attendance.

"[18] Grace Kingsley of the Los Angeles Times described the film as a Western "all dolled up with psychological angles and assorted neuroses," and praised Wendell Corey's performance as a strong point.

"[20] James Agee of Time wrote that the film "is easy to take with tongue in cheek, impossible to take with a straight face...  [its] intricate difficulties are presented in a leathery, smart-cracking kind of dialogue that sounds like an illegitimate great-grandchild of Ernest Hemingway's prose.

A remarkable amount of footage is devoted to the way Miss Scott walks, chews over a line like a bit of Sen-Sen before getting it out, and tools a high-powered convertible around a curve.

[22] In 2012, the Academy Film Archive preserved a screen test for Desert Fury, with Burt Lancaster and Lizabeth Scott.