Desperate Search (1952) is a trim MGM suspense drama without the usual elaborate, glossy MGM look. It's about two kids trapped in the Canadian wilderness after a plane crash, and the efforts of their father (Howard Keel) to find them. Keel is joined by both his former wife (Patricia Medina) and his current wife (Jane Greer), and their interpersonal tensions form one drama while the kids' attempts at survival form another... especially when a cougar begins to stalk them.

This was Keel's second-ever dramatic role after a string of musicals and comedies, and his first for a Hollywood studio. (His film debut had been in the tense British crime drama The Small Voice, aka The Hideout [1948].)

Variety called Desperate Search "strictly a routine offering" but praised Joseph Lewis' directing skill, which it said "hammers home as much tension and suspense as possible."

Lewis later told author Peter Bogdanovich (Who the Devil Made It) that he had to fight to get the look he wanted for this picture, because MGM was the kind of place where "if you asked for a little clothes closet, they'd give you an eight-room house." MGM, in other words, thought big about everything. It was simply the studio mindset, but it wasn't appropriate for all kinds of pictures.

MGM wanted Lewis to shoot on location but he chose not to. He did, however, venture out with his art director for research purposes, or as Lewis put it, "just to see. We spent three weeks there just looking. After three or four days, I called the studio and said, 'All we want to do is look around. We're not going to pick locations -- I think we can do it all on the back lot, and better.' And after three weeks we came home, and shot it all on the back lot. I'll bet we took a thousand photographs. But I had my art director with me, you see, so each time I'd say something, why, he knew what I wanted. There was no second-guessing." A few location shots were made in the California mountains for backgrounds and aerial angles, but the actors did all their work at the studio.

Lewis' next film for MGM, the Louisiana-set Cry of the Hunted (1953), was also shot on the Metro back lot. For a director who had recently scored brilliantly with the low-budget noir Gun Crazy (1950), working on the cheap -- and enjoying the creativity that that unleashed -- appeared to be simply ingrained in his way of thinking as an artist.

Producer: Matthew Rapf
Director: Joseph Lewis
Screenplay: Walter Doniger (writer); Arthur Mayse (novel)
Cinematography: Harold Lipstein
Art Direction: Cedric Gibbons, Eddie Imazu
Film Editing: Joseph Dervin
Cast: Howard Keel (Vince Heldon), Jane Greer (Julie Heldon), Patricia Medina (Nora Stead), Keenan Wynn (Brandy), Robert Burton (Wayne Langmuir), Lee Aaker (Don Heldon), Linda Lowell (Janet Heldon), Elaine Stewart (Stewardess).
BW-71m.

by Jeremy Arnold