Rat Traps

“Well, you go your way and we’ll go the way of all Flesh…”

Mervyn LeRoy’s Heat Lightning (1934) charts people going in different directions but in the end, they’re all just snakes eating their own tails. It is an extraordinary relocation of a motley crew of Warner Bros character actors from their natural urban habitat to the California desert, and the first lead role for the most sardonic Golddigger of 1933, Aline MacMahon, who was subsequently relegated to noble matrons and doormats. Here she’s a little bit of both and a whole lot more, a surprisingly nuanced representation of a world-weary woman’s desperation and repression, defenses and weaknesses. A former Tulsa cabaret moll who woke up in cold sweats, so repulsed was she by the rotten egg she loved, Olga has relocated her kid sister Myra (Ann Dvorak) to a nearly uninhabitable place of last resort. Even in the local movie theater, the shrine to escapism, it’s 115 degrees. “They don’t ask questions in desert towns,” she asserts at her roadside stop twenty six miles outside town, and seems content to make an honest living helping poor saps along their way before never seeing them again. She wears a handkerchief across her head like a nun’s wimple and no makeup, a dislike of “mixed company” stamped across her countenance – bitterness masquerading as a healthy reset of priorities – and an invitation to many an insinuation that she’s “barely a dame.”

But dewy Myra has grown restless with life as an unglorified welcome mat. She slings beer to visitors who recoil from the glare, and then drive away somewhere, anywhere else. She’s being courted by a snakehipped badboy from town whose appeal Olga likens to “the same thrill you get outta seeing a rat run across the bedroom floor.” Myra imperceptibly presumes her older sister’s been a wet blanket in coveralls her whole life and sees no wisdom or experience in her admonitions that it’s better to feel devastated now rather than later – after you’ve been used, abused, and deemed yesterday’s news. The inevitable scene in which her poolhall lizard dumps her back at the rest stop after having his way with her is gently, poignantly bleak: so obvious is his disenchantment after blowing the virginal safe, and so palpable her desperation as she lays a last ditch smacker on him.

Big-eyed good girls wouldn’t be able to kiss that way for much longer, nor would the bad girls for that matter. Heat Lightning is brimming with raw reminders of what we lost with the induction of the Code, and fittingly resided on the Legion of Decency’s first list of banned films, published in Motion Picture Daily on May 14, 1934. “A baboon and a couple of tomatoes,” swing by to flirt with a few fellow travelers and waddle frantically to the outhouse (it may be the only early celluloid depiction of dames in tight jodhpurs attending to the call of nature). They’re hitching a ride to Hollywood with an old-timer who can’t keep his hands to himself, even as he lectures them on the dangers of two pretty gals thumbpushing on the wild road. “It’s your turn to sit in the front with that thigh-pincher, I’ll take to the back seat and nurse my wounds.” But it is hard to believe these gimme girls expect Tinseltown to prove any gentler.

To level the playing field in this battle of the sexes, two dizzy representatives of the very idle rich show up in the always welcome form of Ruth Donnelly and Glenda Farrell – or Tinkle and Feathers in this round. Frank McHugh, as their comfoozled chauffeur, gets to watch someone else tip the bottle for once: when the beer proves too slow-going, the ladies attempt to get high off aspirin soaked in Coca-Cola. Life is tough for former golddiggers with too much dough, and nary a speakeasy in sight.  It’s one of those female dynamics where each finds solace in the others’ shortcomings and drinks their way into ignorance of the fact that such flaws are entirely shared. Occasionally they remember their race to seduce their tail-dragging (and married) driver, who’s got his own worries that he’ll turn pansy if he has to unpack and repack fancy lingerie much longer.

Meanwhile Olga’s own fortress of celibacy crumbles when her Oklahoma rat Jerry (Preston Foster,  a pristine specimen of All-American looks gone slightly, sinisterly awry) shows up on the lam after a double-murder bank heist.  She’s been waiting for this moment to show him how reformed, how hard, how unaffected she is, but she asserts herself just a little too strongly, the most revealing crack in the façade of all. She takes for granted that a man like this ain’t interested in a cold biscuit. To him a wise woman is one who takes care of her legs, who is something “worth going for,” and all he sees now is an opportunity to seduce and distract while his partner breaks the safe containing the wealthy booberines’ jewels.

It is harrowing to watch Olga play into his trap, steal Myra’s lipstick and emerge in a dress ruffled and unshapely. She is a striking lady nonetheless; the beauty of being powerful and powerless all at once – the paradox Hollywood does so well, and best in an era willing to present a ‘madeover’ woman of such odd duck pulchritude. Leroy implicates the audience in this moment of aching vulnerability and outright soulfulness, the camera taking Olga’s perspective as she approaches her former lover.  MacMahon commandingly conveys the tender impatience and hesitancy of her coming out. We can’t blame her, but it is devastating to witness the terror of realizing you’ve returned to old habits, the masochistic addictions, that silly human predilection towards feeling. “Whatever I was before, I’m Different now,” she sings the hymn of Depression-era America. But that’s a tall order for human nature. The way of the flesh reigns. A bickering middle-aged couple at the beginning of the film observes that this hideaway from the hardboiled world is actually “nothing but Detours.” They also embody the penchant for immediate gratification that conversely arose from this age of diminished resources. “I ordered a lemon soda” the henpecked husband doth protests. “Yes, but you like Coca-Cola better.”

“You’re your own worst witness” Olga lectures her sister. “You’re your own best protection,” Tinkle mocks Feathers’s appeal to men (or lack thereof). The movie could be titled “Your Own Worst Enemy,” as the liberation from the dense clusters of the metropolis clarifies the fact that it ain’t other people that’s the problem; it may be the most spacious Warners picture from the era, but Farell and Donnelly still trade wisecracks from their respective porches twenty feet apart. Heat Lightning the title aptly is; out in the sand with nothing but horizon as far as the eye can see (established by a whiplash introductory 360-degree pan), you can’t hear the thunder of the outside world but you can see the storm. Even in this barren, treeless wasteland the shadows of the Depression and the past loom large.

Jerry barely buttons up his pants before he’s greedily back safeside, and Olga takes bittersweet, violent revenge upon discovery of his manipulation. Most films would have followed his partner Lloyd Talbot’s narrative, the essentially good guy gone bad. No one was supposed to be killed. Now he’s got the shakes and he’s depending on the whiles of a loose cannon that’d probably just as soon bump him off as listen to his griping. In another world, he’d have found his salvation in Ann Dvorak  – but this isn’t a realm of convenient happy endings. Not in this heat. While the film takes pity on him, it’s not that interested in him. This is the tale of a woman who “can do anything she sets her mind to,“ except for rewiring its mechanics, how something always foils long-term benefits before they materialize. This a proto-noir fable about how you can’t outsmart a rat, you can only slay it – and there’s a lot more where that came from. Olga tells the awakened ladies that she merely shot a rodent in the hallway, and the next day she assures her next customer that Yes, it really is as boring as it seems out here in the desert, even while a corpse lies behind the counter. A corpse that gave up apologizing with his last breaths and just whispered, “Who cares?”

An immigrant Mexican family has meanwhile been reclining out back under the stars, strumming a soft vaquero melody to counterbalance the movements of these suffering fools – including the rich ladies who thought them the reason their jewels should be locked away.  It’s a strange, surreal background to this strange, surreal purgatory where character actors swing in and out and do what they do best – they’re shlumps we love dearly, in whom we see so much of ourselves, but don’t want to be. It is fitting to see them dumped at the far corners of the earth, mere months before the Production Code sterilized them, took away their dipsomania, checkered pasts, and risqué wisecracks. They’re out there somewhere, just as down and out, desperate, and loud as ever.

by Brynn White

Heat Lightning has finally been released on DVD from Warner Archives.

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