![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
I took a man's job out here and I'm doing a man's work and you're going to be charged a man's price
Mervyn LeRoy's Heat Lightning (1934) is one of the latest and greatest pre-Codes I have ever seen. If your heart does not lift at the thought of long-striding Aline MacMahon in a leading role, not to mention grease-stained overalls and the no-nonsense cool of a woman who can rebuild an engine with assistance from no man, then I don't know what we have to talk about anymore.
A proto-noir released just four months before the enforcement of the Production Code buried it for decades and condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency even before that, Heat Lightning hits its scandalous marks so forthrightly that they look natural, as nuanced female characters, sexual honesty, and no-moral murders should be; it almost prefigures The Petrified Forest (1936) with its plot of crime come to an auto camp and roadside café where a restless girl dreams of horizons beyond the yucca spines and dirt-road shimmer of the desert she unwillingly calls home, but where that film has a soft spot for fatalistic poetry, this one casts a skeptical eye on sweet talk, especially as practiced on women by men. MacMahon's Olga is done with most of men's practices, really. She can banter about the weather with burly motorists and her closest confidant is local rancher Everett (Willard Robertson) whose clunker of a car spends so much time in her garage that she teases him about breaking it just to have an excuse to visit. But she's done with sex, with romance, with the maneuvers that start like friendship and end up in bed: "You put a man and woman together, it gets complicated." There's a touch of the Western in the peace she's found in the solitude of the desert and the self-sufficiency of her own small business, like a gunslinger who has hung up her guns—in Olga's case, the accoutrements of performative femininity that were her "racket" in the days when she bestrode the cabarets of Tulsa like a colossus and couldn't stop loving a charming man who was no good for her and she knew it. No amount of dressing down can really disguise her heavy-lidded, sharp-chinned, ironical beauty, but her total butch disinterest in her face, her figure, and even the glorious weight of her bandanna-hidden hair sets her comfortably beneath the notice of most men and she returns the favor. Not so her little sister. Sheltered, impatient, and cute as chum in the water, Myra (Ann Dvorak) is starving to get out into the world her sister's been working overtime to keep her away from; though she longs to travel like the gritty or glamorous strangers she makes envious change for at the lunch counter, she'll settle for sneaking off to a dance in town with her snaky suitor (Theodore Newton), even or especially after fighting all afternoon with Olga about his intentions. "I don't care what you or anybody else says about him—I love him," she sobs, a terrible echo for Olga who fought her way out of just such a love to hear. "You never had any emotions. You never had any fun. And you don't want me to have any, either!" Not one of these statements is accurate, of course, but Olga's past will have to put in an appearance in order for Myra to find out.
I am now thinking that where The Hunted (1948) really went wrong was in casting Preston Foster as even a flawed hero—like Fred MacMurray, he's an infinitely more plausible heel. Over the twenty-four hours of the plot, the sisters' auto camp will play host to a positive gallery of Depression-era archetypes, from a couple of bickering long-marrieds (Edgar Kennedy and Jane Darwell) to a blonde-and-brunette set of Hollywood-bound hitchhikers and their outclassed sugar daddy (Muriel Evans, Jill Dennett, and Harry C. Bradley) to a catty pair of jewel-bedecked divorcées rebounding on their game but exhausted chauffeur (Glenda Farrell, Ruth Donnelly, and Frank McHugh) and finally a working-class Mexican family (Chris-Pin Martin, Margareta Montez, and a jalopyful of child actors) on their way to Juárez for the fiesta. I am assuming that all of these moving parts were imported from the 1933 Broadway play by Leon Abrams and George Abbott which formed the substrate for the screenplay by Brown Holmes and Warren Duff, but they make for a bingo card of Warners contract players, each contributing their own little acid turn to the generally tart portrayal of male-female relations. "Well, there's one dance I know he ought to be a marvel at, he's got all the qualities—snake hips." "I told them I got a wife and two kids in Flatbush, but that only seemed to encourage them." "Well, you go your way and we'll go the way of all flesh." No self-respecting pre-Code from this studio would be complete without a crook or two, however, and Heat Lightning's arrive in the form of Lyle Talbot's Jeff, a safecracker with a squirmy conscience—he chews nervously on his own necktie—and the smoothly cold-blooded partner (Foster) he calls "George," but whom a stricken Olga recognizes as "Jerry." Large as life and twice as bad, her charming man's headed for the border after turning a bank job into a double slaying, but Olga's resistance inclines him to stick around till morning, especially after the more racist of the divorcées insists on locking her diamonds up for the night with Mexicans on the premises. "Prosperity is just across the border," he assures his unhappy associate. The horizon flickers with heat lightning, with the itchy tension of a storm that isn't breaking and sexual ghosts never truly laid. Myra's been making unwise plans with her Steve since the first act, but we don't worry about Olga until we see her emerge from the house wearing a dress, pale, ruffled, and very feminine, with the wry curve of her mouth pointed in lipstick and the bandanna gone from the wave of her heavy dark hair. She has taken up her guns again: she's beautiful in the ways that make men see her. Everett's tongue-tied, but Jerry grins and grins, wide as the jaws of a trap.
As much as any individually racy line or disrobing silhouette, I suspect the sophistication of this plot doomed the movie during the era of the Code's ascendancy: it knows that sex is not the problem, but rape culture is. The danger to Myra is not whether she'll lose her virginity, but whether she'll be date-raped by a man she trusted. The danger to Olga is not the self-respect cost of a one-night stand, but the emotional violence of being lured by pride and skin-hunger back into an abusive relationship she crossed three state lines to get away from. It's as pitiless an illumination of the rigged games of heterosexuality as anything directed by Dorothy Arzner, which is why I appreciate all the more that it ends not with the destruction of either heroine but with the single, irreproachable bullet of a feminist fairy tale, fired by Olga as coolly and adroitly as the twist-off of a radiator cap: she holds her dying, treacherous lover as he half apologizes, half tries to soft-soap her even as he's bleeding out, her face mute white with emotion, her thick black hair falling unbound over them both; she looks like a ghost, like Death, and then the next minute she has to be just the proprietor of an auto camp stepping out in her wrapper with a revolver in her hand, assuring the guests with her usual careless briskness that she was taking care of an ordinary problem. It's a tour de force, nearly silent performance from MacMahon who was known for her fast talk as much as her humor and it's deeply, powerfully satisfying. It is just as satisfying to see her stepping out from the lunchroom the next morning in her grungy, rangy mechanic's gear, saddened but not destroyed. As if he isn't quite sure what he's seeing, Everett who has agreed to phone the sheriff and in the meantime clear the corpse out of her kitchen remarks hesitantly that it "must be a big help sometimes, being like you, Olga—not having any feelings," and Olga with the teardrop trace of a smile answers the question he's really asking: "I wouldn't know, Everett." And the next traveler pulls in for a fill-'er-up and life in the desert goes on. I can definitely see that not flying after July 1, 1934. Double-features nicely with Night Nurse (1931), though.
I watched this movie in the evening after voting, waiting for the midterm results to begin to come in; they are still coming, disheartening in the Senate but full of House seats flipping blue like dominoes, and I don't know how cautiously hopeful vs. continuingly stressed to feel about my country, but in the hours of maximum uncertainty I found it useful to be reminded that pendulums swing, that the past was no more all one thing than the present, and that more than eighty years ago Hollywood knew, even if it was later obliged to forget it, that women could be front and center in their own stories. Heat Lightning notices, too, that paranoia about Mexican immigrants is contemptibly racist, and that a heroine should speak to strangers in their own language if she knows it. The paramount relationship is the sisters, not either with any man. It runs 63 minutes and it doesn't waste a one of them; its exteriors are sun-baked Mojave Desert and its interiors as hot, cheap, and dusty as the studio could make them; Martin contributes some beautiful Spanish-language guitar ballads to the soundtrack. Everyone I know should be aware of the sexiness of competence that is Aline MacMahon in dungarees and a sweaty workshirt, repairing a car. This heat brought to you by my independent backers at Patreon.
A proto-noir released just four months before the enforcement of the Production Code buried it for decades and condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency even before that, Heat Lightning hits its scandalous marks so forthrightly that they look natural, as nuanced female characters, sexual honesty, and no-moral murders should be; it almost prefigures The Petrified Forest (1936) with its plot of crime come to an auto camp and roadside café where a restless girl dreams of horizons beyond the yucca spines and dirt-road shimmer of the desert she unwillingly calls home, but where that film has a soft spot for fatalistic poetry, this one casts a skeptical eye on sweet talk, especially as practiced on women by men. MacMahon's Olga is done with most of men's practices, really. She can banter about the weather with burly motorists and her closest confidant is local rancher Everett (Willard Robertson) whose clunker of a car spends so much time in her garage that she teases him about breaking it just to have an excuse to visit. But she's done with sex, with romance, with the maneuvers that start like friendship and end up in bed: "You put a man and woman together, it gets complicated." There's a touch of the Western in the peace she's found in the solitude of the desert and the self-sufficiency of her own small business, like a gunslinger who has hung up her guns—in Olga's case, the accoutrements of performative femininity that were her "racket" in the days when she bestrode the cabarets of Tulsa like a colossus and couldn't stop loving a charming man who was no good for her and she knew it. No amount of dressing down can really disguise her heavy-lidded, sharp-chinned, ironical beauty, but her total butch disinterest in her face, her figure, and even the glorious weight of her bandanna-hidden hair sets her comfortably beneath the notice of most men and she returns the favor. Not so her little sister. Sheltered, impatient, and cute as chum in the water, Myra (Ann Dvorak) is starving to get out into the world her sister's been working overtime to keep her away from; though she longs to travel like the gritty or glamorous strangers she makes envious change for at the lunch counter, she'll settle for sneaking off to a dance in town with her snaky suitor (Theodore Newton), even or especially after fighting all afternoon with Olga about his intentions. "I don't care what you or anybody else says about him—I love him," she sobs, a terrible echo for Olga who fought her way out of just such a love to hear. "You never had any emotions. You never had any fun. And you don't want me to have any, either!" Not one of these statements is accurate, of course, but Olga's past will have to put in an appearance in order for Myra to find out.
I am now thinking that where The Hunted (1948) really went wrong was in casting Preston Foster as even a flawed hero—like Fred MacMurray, he's an infinitely more plausible heel. Over the twenty-four hours of the plot, the sisters' auto camp will play host to a positive gallery of Depression-era archetypes, from a couple of bickering long-marrieds (Edgar Kennedy and Jane Darwell) to a blonde-and-brunette set of Hollywood-bound hitchhikers and their outclassed sugar daddy (Muriel Evans, Jill Dennett, and Harry C. Bradley) to a catty pair of jewel-bedecked divorcées rebounding on their game but exhausted chauffeur (Glenda Farrell, Ruth Donnelly, and Frank McHugh) and finally a working-class Mexican family (Chris-Pin Martin, Margareta Montez, and a jalopyful of child actors) on their way to Juárez for the fiesta. I am assuming that all of these moving parts were imported from the 1933 Broadway play by Leon Abrams and George Abbott which formed the substrate for the screenplay by Brown Holmes and Warren Duff, but they make for a bingo card of Warners contract players, each contributing their own little acid turn to the generally tart portrayal of male-female relations. "Well, there's one dance I know he ought to be a marvel at, he's got all the qualities—snake hips." "I told them I got a wife and two kids in Flatbush, but that only seemed to encourage them." "Well, you go your way and we'll go the way of all flesh." No self-respecting pre-Code from this studio would be complete without a crook or two, however, and Heat Lightning's arrive in the form of Lyle Talbot's Jeff, a safecracker with a squirmy conscience—he chews nervously on his own necktie—and the smoothly cold-blooded partner (Foster) he calls "George," but whom a stricken Olga recognizes as "Jerry." Large as life and twice as bad, her charming man's headed for the border after turning a bank job into a double slaying, but Olga's resistance inclines him to stick around till morning, especially after the more racist of the divorcées insists on locking her diamonds up for the night with Mexicans on the premises. "Prosperity is just across the border," he assures his unhappy associate. The horizon flickers with heat lightning, with the itchy tension of a storm that isn't breaking and sexual ghosts never truly laid. Myra's been making unwise plans with her Steve since the first act, but we don't worry about Olga until we see her emerge from the house wearing a dress, pale, ruffled, and very feminine, with the wry curve of her mouth pointed in lipstick and the bandanna gone from the wave of her heavy dark hair. She has taken up her guns again: she's beautiful in the ways that make men see her. Everett's tongue-tied, but Jerry grins and grins, wide as the jaws of a trap.
As much as any individually racy line or disrobing silhouette, I suspect the sophistication of this plot doomed the movie during the era of the Code's ascendancy: it knows that sex is not the problem, but rape culture is. The danger to Myra is not whether she'll lose her virginity, but whether she'll be date-raped by a man she trusted. The danger to Olga is not the self-respect cost of a one-night stand, but the emotional violence of being lured by pride and skin-hunger back into an abusive relationship she crossed three state lines to get away from. It's as pitiless an illumination of the rigged games of heterosexuality as anything directed by Dorothy Arzner, which is why I appreciate all the more that it ends not with the destruction of either heroine but with the single, irreproachable bullet of a feminist fairy tale, fired by Olga as coolly and adroitly as the twist-off of a radiator cap: she holds her dying, treacherous lover as he half apologizes, half tries to soft-soap her even as he's bleeding out, her face mute white with emotion, her thick black hair falling unbound over them both; she looks like a ghost, like Death, and then the next minute she has to be just the proprietor of an auto camp stepping out in her wrapper with a revolver in her hand, assuring the guests with her usual careless briskness that she was taking care of an ordinary problem. It's a tour de force, nearly silent performance from MacMahon who was known for her fast talk as much as her humor and it's deeply, powerfully satisfying. It is just as satisfying to see her stepping out from the lunchroom the next morning in her grungy, rangy mechanic's gear, saddened but not destroyed. As if he isn't quite sure what he's seeing, Everett who has agreed to phone the sheriff and in the meantime clear the corpse out of her kitchen remarks hesitantly that it "must be a big help sometimes, being like you, Olga—not having any feelings," and Olga with the teardrop trace of a smile answers the question he's really asking: "I wouldn't know, Everett." And the next traveler pulls in for a fill-'er-up and life in the desert goes on. I can definitely see that not flying after July 1, 1934. Double-features nicely with Night Nurse (1931), though.
I watched this movie in the evening after voting, waiting for the midterm results to begin to come in; they are still coming, disheartening in the Senate but full of House seats flipping blue like dominoes, and I don't know how cautiously hopeful vs. continuingly stressed to feel about my country, but in the hours of maximum uncertainty I found it useful to be reminded that pendulums swing, that the past was no more all one thing than the present, and that more than eighty years ago Hollywood knew, even if it was later obliged to forget it, that women could be front and center in their own stories. Heat Lightning notices, too, that paranoia about Mexican immigrants is contemptibly racist, and that a heroine should speak to strangers in their own language if she knows it. The paramount relationship is the sisters, not either with any man. It runs 63 minutes and it doesn't waste a one of them; its exteriors are sun-baked Mojave Desert and its interiors as hot, cheap, and dusty as the studio could make them; Martin contributes some beautiful Spanish-language guitar ballads to the soundtrack. Everyone I know should be aware of the sexiness of competence that is Aline MacMahon in dungarees and a sweaty workshirt, repairing a car. This heat brought to you by my independent backers at Patreon.
no subject
Nine
no subject
We still live in the era of the shadow of the Code, but I look forward to being out of it for real one of these days. And I look forward to being out of some other shadows, too.
no subject
Your service to the empire is, as always, visually appreciated.
Also, "cute as chum in the water" is an excellent phrase and the fourth paragraph just cements for me the fact you need to put these reviews in a themed e-book collection of some kind. They're not just about the silver nitrate. They're social commentary.
no subject
no subject
So noted.
(You get a picture of Aline MacMahon, too.)
no subject
no subject
SHE SAYS HI.
Your service to the empire is, as always, visually appreciated.
I try to use my powers for good.
Also, "cute as chum in the water" is an excellent phrase and the fourth paragraph just cements for me the fact you need to put these reviews in a themed e-book collection of some kind. They're not just about the silver nitrate. They're social commentary.
Thank you. I really am trying to figure out how to make something like this happen. There's a lot more Tiny Wittgenstein involved in anything academia-adjacent than in fiction or poetry.
no subject
no subject
I am short on words, but humming with delight that you got to see and appreciate this movie, not least because everyone should appreciate the glory of MacMahon in dungarees and engine grease.
And also because now I have something I can point to and say: this! see this film! this is why!
no subject
She's wonderful. I'm so glad to have seen her finally in a leading role and I'm so glad this was it. Once it turned up on TCM, I suspect I would have watched it no matter what, but I remembered you posting about it at least a year ago, and you provided very convincing visual support for your argument.
And also because now I have something I can point to and say: this! see this film! this is why!
Thank you!
no subject
no subject
Good for Amazon! (I get so few chances to say that.)
no subject
Thinking about it: I love this moment so because it's so utterly not the "why, without your glasses you're beautiful" moment when the "plain" heroine reveals her True Feminine Beauty. It's certainly not "realer" than Olga in butch mode (or more fake, either; this is such a sophisticated film), and it doesn't act to reassure the audience, to affirm the rightful and proper gender order or what leading ladies are supposed to look like; it makes you afraid for her because in that specific context it makes it so clear that Jerry's got under her skin.
no subject
I love how many ways we get to see her be beautiful.
(I found a cache of production photos and it is making me happy.)
and it doesn't act to reassure the audience, to affirm the rightful and proper gender order or what leading ladies are supposed to look like; it makes you afraid for her because in that specific context it makes it so clear that Jerry's got under her skin.
Yes. The clothes themselves are neutral in the same way that sex in this story is neutral. It's what people do with them, or what they indicate, that's weighted.
no subject
Thank you for the review!
no subject
You're welcome! I loved the movie!