Lust in the Dust (Fox Run Productions, New World Cinema, 1984)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 11:30 p.m. I ended up turning on Turner Classic Movies just to see what was on there and whether it would be worth watching – and it turned out it was: it was a 1984 spoof Western called Lust in the Dust, directed by Paul Bartel (whom I actually met at San Francisco State University in 1979; he was showing his brilliant half-hour short The Secret Cinema, a vest-pocket masterpiece from 1968 that anticipates The Truman Show and all those other movies from the late 1990’s and early 2000’s featuring central characters whose lives, unbeknownst to them, were being manipulated and filmed as a form of mass entertainment; and his 1975 film Death Race 2000, in which he said the studio, American International, gave him teeny Volkswagen-powered cars and expected him to film a thrilling movie about drivers racing each other to the death, so he shot the auto races in fast motion and camped it up) from a script by Philip John Taylor. By chance my friend Garry, whom I’d had over for dinner earlier in the evening, is an enormous fan of this movie – he had it on VHS and one year I bought him a DVD of it as a holiday present – and he had once insisted on showing it to me. I hated it then and wasn’t sure I should watch it again – afterwards I told Garry, “Me; Brooks’ Blazing Saddles is my idea of a comedy Western” – but this time around I liked it a whole lot better.

Lust in the Dust got its title from the controversy surrounding David O. Selznick’s 1946 production Duel in the Sun, a convoluted big-budget Western set in the New Mexico desert and featuring Selznick’s second wife, Jennifer Jones, as “Pearl Chavez,” bad girl who’s the object of a rivalry between good brother Joseph Cotten and bad brother Gregory Peck. Though its 1970’s reissue was considered so bland it got a “G” rating, for 1946 it was an unusually sexually explicit movie and it got nicknamed “Lust in the Dust” by Hollywood’s jokesters. Aside from a parody of Jones’s extended death scene at the end of Duel in the Sun, Lust in the Dust really doesn’t have much in common with the Selznick film. Instead it’s a breezy 84-minute run through a lot of Western tropes, with the sort of oddly assorted cast its star’s usual director, John Waters, liked to put together. The lead is fading heartthrob Tab Hunter, whose role as “Abel Wood” is a parody of the ludicrously taciturn and alienated heroes Clint Eastwood played in the mid-1960’s “spaghetti Westerns” (so-called because they were shot in Italy) in which director Sergio Leone made Eastwood an international star. The “female” lead is Divine, the gender-ambiguous actor Waters used in most of his movies until her death in 1988 (I’m using the female pronoun because she was genetically male but usually played women, though in her last film, Waters’ Hairspray, he cast her in two roles, one as a woman and one as a man), with Lainie Kazan as the second female lead and old names like Cesar Romero and Woody Strode (who’d actually starred in Sergeant Rutledge for John Ford in 1960, probably the first Western ever made for a non-“race” audience that featured a Black actor in the male lead) filling out the cast.

The film opens with Divine getting stranded in the New Mexico desert (the entire film was shot in New Mexico and the spectacular desert canyons and mesas really help this film and make it look like it had a bigger budget than it did). She loses the liquid in her canteen – which turns out to be not water, but gin – and she’s waylaid and gang-raped by a group of five outlaws. This being a Divine film, she’s unclear about whether she’s repelled by the experience or she actually enjoys it – we do know that one of the outlaws who came to rape her ends up complaining that she wore him out sexually. She’s on her way to the town of Chile Verde in hopes of finding a job singing at Marguerita Ventura’s (Lainie Kazan) cantina, only to find when she arrives that Marguerita doesn’t need to hire a singer because she does the entertaining herself. While in the desert she also runs into Abel Wood (Tab Hunter) doing his bizarre Clint Eastwood parody and sort-of leading Divine, as “Rosie,” to Marguerita’s place. Marguerita’s place is supposed to be a whorehouse but she only has three women available: herself, Ninfa (Gina Gallego), and Big Ed (Nedra Volz), who definitely presents as a cisgender woman but is also way too, shall we say, “long in the tooth” to be believable as a prostitute in any but this fantasy-spoof context. There’s also a priest, Father Garcia (Cesar Romero), who hears Abel Wood’s confession and not surprisingly turns out to be one of the desperados out after the film’s thoughtfully provided MacGuffin: a buried treasure of gold embezzled by a bank official who absconded with it, buried it before he could get caught, but was ultimately shot and killed. (His gravesite – which, unsurprisingly, turns out to be where the gold is hidden – becomes a major center for the action in this movie.)

It’s the sort of movie in which the characters have sex in multiple combinations and for not very well-specified reasons – though Divine’s moans of ecstasy as various people seem to crawl inside her voluminous skirts and diddle with whatever parts she’s got down there are delightful (it’s a film being driven by the same sensibility as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, in particular the scene in which Brad Majors realizes he’s being diddled by Dr. Frank N. Furter and says, “Don’t stop, don’t stop – I mean stop, stop!”). Lust in the Dust is driven plot-wise (to the extent it matters, which it really doesn’t) by two clues as to the location of the treasure: a limerick that references Scotland and two halves of a map indicating its location, which are each tattooed on a buttock belonging to the two “female” leads – which indicates in a late-arriving revelation that the two were really sisters and their dad, the original embezzler, tattooed the map on their butts, each side unreadable without the other. In the end various contestants for the treasure, including the feared gang leader “Hard Case” Williams (Geoffrey Lewis) and Marguerita’s pianist “Red Dick” Barker (Courtney Garris, the twinkiest guy in the movie and one who exits well before the finale, more’s the pity – he explains his nickname by saying his name is Richard and he has red hair – it’s that sort of movie), converge on each other and there’s a big final shoot-out, after which Abel and Marguerita escape with the gold (ya remember the gold?) and Rosie, after flopping around like Jennifer Jones in the movie that inspired this one, picks herself up and gets to exit with a line from another David O. Selznick heroine, Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind: “After all, tomorrow is another day.”

It occurred to me that Lust in the Dust compares to Blazing Saddles much the way The Rocky Horror Picture Show compared to Brooks’ Young Frankenstein: while Blazing Saddles had its share of tasteless gags and sex jokes, it also was made with a certain reverence for its models which Lust in the Dust definitely lacks. I’m not sure why I reacted to this movie so differently last night than I had when I saw it before, but this time I really enjoyed it, reveling in its no-holds-barred approach to sexual humor and its total irreverence towards normal standards of filmmaking. The film contains three songs – all written by Karen Hart and arranged by 1950’s and 1960’s pop arranger Peter Matz – including an opening number, “Tarnished Tumbleweed,” sung by Mike Stall (he’s good but this would have been even funnier if the producers had been able to get Frankie Laine to sing it the way Mel Brooks did in Blazing Saddles), and vehicles for the golden throat of Divine (“These Lips Were Made for Kisses”) and Lainie Kazan – who actually had a reputation as a singer, though you couldn’t have told it from her work here (“South of My Border”) – and the songs just add to the overall quality of this movie, which transcends most ordinary notions of quality in movies but still manages to be very funny and quite entertaining (and leaves me wondering why I didn’t connect to it earlier!).