SECOND EDITION - a re-issue of ANN BLYTH: ACTRESS. SINGER. STAR.

Tomorrow, Ann Blyth, one of the last remaining figures from Hollywood's Golden Age, will celebrate her 97th birthday.

Ten years ago, I published a book on her career, Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star., that had its roots in a year-long series of blog posts in 2014 on her work.  As I mentioned a couple months ago, I've been working on putting out a second edition, with some additional material, and making a hardcover version available, as well, for the first time.  

I'm pleased to announce that the book is now out in eBook, paperback, hardcover, and audio.  I guess that covers all bases.

You may purchase the eBook here at my Shopify store,

     or from a variety of online shops, including Barnes & Noble and Apple iTunes here.

The paperback version and the hardcover version are also available from Barnes & Noble here, and the paperback 

from  Walmart here.

You may purchase the paperback from IngramSpark here, 

     and also a hardcover version from IngramSpark here.

At Amazon, you may purchase the eBook, the paperback, the hardcover, or the audiobook here.

You can also purchase both the paperback and the hardcover through Bookshop.org which supports local bookstores.

How delightful it is to celebrate a long career and a happy life.  

Modern Times (1936)

Modern Times (1936) says goodbye to The Little Tramp and hello to a brave new world. Charlie Chaplin takes aim at the horrors of industrialism and the tribulations of the Great Depression, and yet he brings along a nostalgic zest for the earlier twentieth century that is not going gently into that good night.  Inevitably, he presents us with a Valentine.

Continuing our look this year at films from the 1930s that make a social commentary on that decade, as I’ve mentioned before, many filmmakers in this era chose to deliberately comment on social conditions in that challenging time and make “modern times” the backdrop of even silly comedies.  You didn’t have to look far to see a message.   We turn now to a giant (a little giant maybe, but still a giant) in the history of film who does just this, and uses it to give his most famous and beloved character not just a curtain call, but a socially relevant one.

Mr. Chaplin came to realize that The Little Tramp’s era of particular innocence was over, and practically speaking, there was no way to continue his adventures not speaking.  Therefore, this is the last “silent film” made featuring our hapless hero.  However, it is also the first film we hear Chaplin’s voice—later in the movie when he sings a silly song.

The film is mostly silent, with some sound effects and very little dialogue—mostly from the boss of the factory who bellows at his employees via a large television-type screen.  This is not your father’s industrial revolution; in fact, the factory where Chaplin works is almost Buck Rogers futuristic, an Art Deco version of a factory.  It is the 1930s, after all.

The movie starts with a stark title screen and a rather film noir-ish musical theme, threatening and foreboding.   We see the image of a flock of sheep, and then the image of men climbing subway steps in a herd, running to the factory, to suggest that they are sheep.  The title card tells us this is “A story of industry, of individual enterprise—humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness.”

Will humanity succeed in finding happiness?  Maybe only at times.

It doesn’t start well for The Little Tramp and quickly goes downhill from there.  We see him tightening nuts on an assembly line, having trouble keeping up.  The bellowing owner from his omniscient screen observes them and wants more speed.  He is played by Al Ernest Garcia.

Charlie takes a smoke break in the washroom, but he gets yelled at by the face on the screen even in there.  Big Brother is even in the bathroom.

Efficiency experts come to the factory to demonstrate a new machine that will make the workers eat lunch faster—and poor Charlie is chosen to demonstrate.  Strapped into a chair, a revolving, demonic lazy Susan is placed before him, and he is force-fed soup, corn on the cob, and gets the traditional slapstick pie in the face from a mechanical arm, while his face is blotted intermittently with a large office blotter.  It’s a funny skit, and levity helps us—if not Charlie—from going crazy at the imprisonment of his workplace. 

When Charlie is on a break or off the line, he continues to twitch with the motion of tightening nuts with two large wrenches.  Poor Charlie goes berserk from the stress, ends up being threaded through the giant cogs of a machine in the iconic scene.  Afterwards, he takes his large wrenches and attempts to tighten anything—including the large dress buttons strategically placed on the breasts of a passing woman.  This is one of those gags that’s more funny if we are led right up to the moment and then is suddenly cut off, because what we imagine could happen is always funnier.

Playfully and maniacally out of control, Charlie is chased by his co-workers, taken to a hospital, and later, cured of a nervous breakdown, and must start his life over.

He is constantly starting over from square one in this movie, and that, too, is a comment on the modern condition.  We must be prepared to start over.  Always.

In another funny mistake, he falls into a manhole and comes up with a red warning flag, such that construction workers would take on a job, and when he emerges from the manhole with the flag, just at that moment, a protest march by a communist workers’ group is going by and he gets swept up with them.  He is rounded up and taken to the police station. 

Meanwhile, Paulette Goddard plays a poor girl living in a shack by the waterfront with her widowed father and two kid sisters. She is The Gamin. Dad is out of work, heavily burdened by the Depression, and Paulette, with a scrappy survivor’s instinct, steals bananas to feed the family.  Reportedly, one of her little sisters was played by Gloria DeHaven at 10 or 11 years old in her first role.

Charlie is sent to prison, and when cocaine is smuggled to another prisoner via a salt shaker, referred to on our helpful title card as “nose powder,” Charlie inadvertently douses his food with it.  His wide-eyed reaction tells us he is high.  One wonders how that got by the Production Code.  Helpless to control himself, he accidentally foils a plot by revolting prisoners to overtake the guards, and he is rewarded with release.  He doesn’t really want to leave, though.  He is cozy in his cell, with no responsibilities and three squares a day.  It’s a good setup for a guy like Charlie, who loses every job he gets.  When he is freed, he is told, “Now make good.”

The Gamin, meanwhile, gets into trouble when her poor father is shot to death.  The authorities step in and take the two younger girls, but Paulette escapes.  She finally crosses paths with Charlie when he gets fired from a shipbuilding company on the waterfront where she lives, and he accidentally launches a half-built ship. She has stolen bread and runs smack into him.  Gentleman that he is, and out of work besides, he allows himself to be arrested and carted off to the hoosegow once again.  He offers his seat to Paulette in the police van and helps her to escape.  Even eating a big meal in a restaurant without the money to pay for it won’t keep him in jail for long, but when he meets Paulette, Charlie decides it’s better to stay out of jail, and he vows he will get a home for them both, “even if I have to work for it.”

They are two lost souls battling the storms of life, but The Little Tramp is a man-child, and their relationship is as playful as brother and sister.

He takes a job as a night watchman in a department store.  Again, as we’ve seen in this previous post on Employees' Entrance (1933), the multi-story downtown department store has a special place in the Great Depression.  It is the cathedral of commerce, with the promise of good times coming again, despite most people not having enough money to do more than window-shop.

Charlie provides a place for Paulette to sleep on home furnishings floor, and while she luxuriates in a comfortable floor model bed, he runs into a former co-worker from the factory that has now been shut down.  He is Big Bill, played by Stanley “Tiny” Sandford, and he is going to rob the store.  One of his accomplices explains, “We ain’t burglars—we’re hungry.”  

It ends, of course, with Charlie taken off to jail again, but before that we have that stunning scene where he tries out roller skates and nearly plumets to his death on a floor where renovation construction is not finished and he comes very close to falling several stories while cutting a caper with fancy skating moves.  Classic film fans may know this is just a very clever matte shot, and Chaplin was not in danger doing the stunt, but it looks terrific.

When Charlie is released from jail this time, Paulette faithfully waits for him, and provides a tumbledown shack for their home, and she has returned to stealing food. 

The factory where he worked at the beginning of the movie is reopening and he hopes to get a real home for them.  He is assigned as an assistant to a mechanic, played by Chester Conklin.  This time, Chester gets caught in the cogs and Charlie’s not much help.  Paulette, Charlie, and Chester would all reunite in The Great Dictator (1940).

Believe it or not, he has another stay in jail, while Paulette gets a job as a dancer in a café, and she gets him a job as a singing waiter there when he’s out of the lockup.  Here’s where we get to finally hear Charlie Chaplin’s voice.  He cannot remember the words to the song he’s supposed to sing, so he makes up gibberish and we see him dashing about the dancefloor, twisting himself into a frenetic ballet, and singing a song Chaplin wrote called, “Je cherche après titine,” which is a mixture of French and Italian that he roguishly performs as a supposedly risqué song. Have a look here.

But wouldn’t you know, life comes down hard again, and the authorities who have been looking for Paulette all this time have returned.  She and Charlie escape, but scrappy Paulette has finally run out of courage.  They stand on the dusty open road that stretches out miles ahead of them.  Is it promising, or is it bleak?  Perhaps it’s just a matter of viewpoint.

“What’s the use of trying?” she says in tears.

He answers, “Buck up—never say die.  We’ll get along!”  It is the theme of the Great Depression for those who survived it.  I can remember many years ago watching a documentary series on the Great Depression with my father, who was a teenager during those years, and who joined the Civilian Conservation Corps to help send money back to support his widowed mother and kid sisters.  At the time, it was an adventure.  Bad times were shrugged off because if they weren’t, you were done for just by giving up.  But as an old man, looking back, with perhaps less courage than he had when he was a teen, and having acquired a great deal more knowledge about life in the meantime, he muttered, stony-faced at the TV:  “My God, it’s a wonder we ever survived it.”

In the background, while Charlie is comforting Paulette, we hear the music he wrote, which would later gain lyrics and the title “Smile.”  The first to record it supposedly was Nat King Cole, many years later.  You can listen to it here.

There was no single anthem of that generation, but this quiet, hopeful song may have been one of them.

It was a perfect way, as Charlie and Paulette gather their things and walk down the road together to meet head-on whatever happens next, for The Little Tramp to leave us.  I like to think he’s still down the road somewhere, shrugging off mishaps.

  *******************************

Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

It is also here in paperback from Ingram.

And here in hardcover from Ingram.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation. 

 

 

 

 

 

Happy Independence Day

Wishing all our American readers a Happy Independence Day tomorrow, with a reminder of the most sacred words of our Declaration of Independence, adopted this day, 249 years ago -- some of our specific complaints against King George III:

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

The traitor felon in the White House is guilty of all of them.

Happy NO KINGS DAY.

Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. -- second edition

This is to announce a new/old project.  Ten years ago, I published ANN BLYTH: ACTRESS. SINGER. STAR.  A lot of water has gone under the bridge in the last decade, but it remains a book close to my heart.  

In the past several weeks, I've been tinkering with the manuscript with the intention of publishing a second edition, one that will include a few more bits of info, a handful of additional photos from her stage appearances, an afterward about the book, and...an additional hardcover edition.

I'm also working to get the print paperback more widely available.  At the moment, the eBook is sold through a variety of online shops, including my own, here.  The print book currently is available only from Amazon.  In the coming weeks, I hope to make the print paperback book also available through Barnes & Noble online and as many other online shops as possible.

The new hardcover edition at first will be sold only through Amazon, but I hope in future to make the hardcover also available for purchase at other venues.

Massacre (1934)

Massacre (1934) is a bold standoff against treatment and societal views of the modern Native American, as well as the industry that brought us westerns with little appetite for treating Indians as nothing more than stereotypes…and targets.

It manages, however, to be more than just a message film, for the story involves a lot of action, a fast-moving story line, and cool deliberation on the part of Joe Thunderhorse, a man whose two-fisted approach to life brings him away from the reservation so long that Sioux culture and its modern problems mean little to him.  He’s out for himself and very successful at it.  What brings him back to his tribe is a shock, and he brings the audience with him.

Richard Barthelmess, one of my favorites, is very good in this strong role.  He manages, as does his character, to straddle the world of hardscrabble make-a-buck early 1930s and the ancient culture into which he was born but left at a young age to make his way in the world.  For him, it is not just the “white man’s world,” it is his world.  He walks with authority, like the son of a chief, like a guy who wears his self-confidence as if it were a bullet-proof vest. He generally has a great time, but he is not afraid to challenge anyone.

We first meet him in Indian garb riding a horse in a procession at a wild west show at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933, and the theme of the fair, “Century of Progress” is only part of the irony facing the audience when, sinking into the story, we immediately begin to consider the plight of the Native American in twentieth-century America.  Where is their progress?  

Barthelmess is the star of the show, and his pictures on programs bring in a lot of money to the stock company, run by Robert Barratt, a kind of Wild Bill Hickok knockoff.  Barthelmess does trick riding, fancy shooting at targets, and makes the girls swoon, particularly Claire Dodd, a wealthy sophisticate who has designs on him. 

Barthelmess earns the princely sum of $300 per week, and demands for $400 and will get it.  He has a valet played by Clarence Muse.  No jovial Indian sidekick, his manservant is Black, but seems more a pal than a lackey.  He calls Barthelmess “Chief” like everyone else does, not “Boss.”   Our first surprise is when the monosyllabic “Chief” rides out of the stadium, goes to the manager’s tent where his valet removes the wig with the long braids, and reveals a modern Joe, who changes into a suit and speaks English fluently.  We see he has only been playing a part.  He is suddenly almost like a cross between Clark Gable’s masculine polish and James Cagney’s Bowery toughness.  He smokes, he chews gum (sometimes at the same time), and strides out to his own sporty automobile with his name and picture emblazoned on the doors.  The ten-gallon hat he wears is so large and ostentatious, it probably really does hold ten gallons.

I like the shot of Mr. Muse's face in the obverse side of the hand mirror he holds for Barthelmess.

Mr. Barthelmess amuses himself with the adoration of the females in the crowd, and has a shallow romantic relationship with Claire Dodd.  It is interesting that while Hollywood would not stoop to his having a white manservant, he is allowed to have a white lady friend.  Their kiss, a long and seductive encounter between two races in America at that time we might consider to be a daring image.  Was it allowed because the audience was already familiar with the long career of Richard Barthelmess and knew he was not really Sioux, or is it because Claire Dodd is playing a coolly unsympathetic woman who collects men and marries on a whim?  We have to question her emotional and mental stability when, as Barthelmess arrives for a cocktail party at her mansion, she brings him to a room that is filled with Indian regalia and artifacts.  He looks at the objects, interested, as if he is on a museum tour, and will later confess that he realized at that moment he has gotten so far afield from his native roots that the significance of the pieces were lost on him and needed to be explained to him.

But it is her fascination with the objects and collecting them, the way she has collected men, that says a great deal about her.  She is not a historian, an anthropologist, or a scholar; she has created a fantasy revolving around Joe Thunderhorse that is more sexual desire than cultural interest.  She clings to him and murmurs her image of him as a wild, “red man” and she would like to be his “squaw.” 

This movie seems to straddle, perhaps knowingly, the conflicting images, tropes, of the Indian as a savage and as a noble and beautiful child of nature.  Joe Thunderhorse is neither, he’s a just guy. 

Massacre, like some of the previous movies covered (Heat Lightning, Employees’ Entrance), is a First National film, and we may reliably count on a frank, sometimes stark, socially conscious message.  The Vitaphone Orchestra and the opening credits with the cameo portraits of the principal players might momentarily distract us at the old moviehouse like a doily on a scratched tabletop, but we know what we’re getting underneath.  It’s wonderful, gritty honesty.

Spoilers at this point, naturally.

Barthelmess gets word that his father, still back on the reservation, is dying and is asking for him.  So he takes Clarence Muse with him and drives his outlandish auto out to the reservation, which he left when he was still a boy.  The government agent at the time he was there, played by Henry O’Neill, who is now working in Washington, D.C., sent him to the Haskell Institute, where he learned skills to make his way in the world.  But Barthelmess returns to a desolate landscape he had almost forgotten, and which seems to have gotten worse in the years since he’d left.  Even Clarence Muse notices and remarks, “White folks don’t give the Indian much of a break.”

The reservation is now run by unscrupulous managers.  There is Dudley Digges, the agent in charge, whose side hustle is graft and more graft.

Frank McGlynn, Sr., is the arrogant, posturing, bloviating missionary.  His funeral service for Joe’s father is all phony hype and brings no comfort to the family.  Joe will afterward insist on a Sioux ritual that is far more spiritual and sincere.  As Barthelmess looks to the night sky, he seems to truly mourn for his father, and perhaps for his people.

Sidney Toler, several years before his longtime gig as the kindly inspector Charlie Chan, plays the smarmy undertaker, whose crimes against the Sioux involve not only fraud and graft, but rape.

When Barthelmess arrives at the agent’s office on the reservation, he is all curiosity and impatience, and has no idea what corruption he has before him.  A poised, beautiful young officer worker, played by Ann Dvorak, catches his immediate attention.  She is Sioux also, and when she answers him in perfect English, he smiles in recognition and asks if she, too, had been sent to the Haskell Institute.  She was, but she came home to make a life on the reservation, and in her small way, to make a difference.  We don’t learn much about her character or her family, but she will prove invaluable to Barthelmess in helping him navigate this complicated world on the reservation.

The Haskell Institute, a real-life Indian school, was founded in 1884, and like many such boarding institutions, created an often harsh and even cruel environment for the Indian children who attended.  It grew into a land-grant college now known as Haskell Indian Native University, where some 140 Indian and native Alaskan nations are represented in its student body.  In February of this year, 2025, budget cuts as a result of the whims of the traitor felon currently residing in the White House have forced the lay-off of one-quarter of the staff.

Barthelmess renews acquaintance with his younger brother and sister, and cousins, but bristles at what he has observed in their miserable lives under the authority of the local agent.  He is not shy about complaining or throwing a punch or two, and Ann Dvorak warns him that he could be arrested and confined to the reservation and never be allowed to leave again.

He is enraged to discover that the unscrupulous undertaker, Sidney Toler, has raped his 15-year-old sister, Jennie, played by Agnes Narcha.  Lovely Miss Narcha plays the tragic role well, but has few lines and this was apparently one of only two movies she made.

Barthelmess hops in his car to go hunt down Toler, and we know he means business because he has bought the lariat off a cowboy on a horse in town.  Barthelmess speeds away, catches up to Toler’s car in one of a few car chases in this film, and lassos him from behind, yanking him out of the car and then dragging him along the dusty road, finally unleashing his inert, battered body.  He is unconscious and rolls to the side of the road, where Barthelmess leaves him.

Barthelmess is put on trial on the reservation in a kangaroo court, with three illiterate and docile Indians as judges to convict him.  Ann Dvorak sneaks him the key to the jail cell, and he and Clarence Muse drive off, away from the reservation. Cleverly, when the cop cars begin to chase his unmistakable auto down the highway, it is Mr. Muse they catch, wearing the ten-gallon hat as a disguise.  Barthelmess has taken Muse’s flat cap and hops a freight. 

Finally, he makes it to Washington, D.C., where he hopes to bring his plight to his old mentor, the former agent on the reservation, played by Henry O’Neill.  As he leaves the freight yard, we see the Capitol Dome in the distance over the top of an old wooden fence, and the familiar Blue Eagle of the NRA poster plastered on it.  President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration was established the year before, in 1933, and was a popular start to the New Deal among distressed workers.  Participation in the NRA among businessowners was voluntary, and in part involved agreeing to establish a minimum wage between 20 and 45 cents per hour, to limit the work week from between 35 to 40 hours, and to abolish child labor.  In 1935, the U.S. Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional. However, some of its features remained and were carried forward in other progressive legislation in those years. 

Barthelmess makes contact with Henry O’Neill, who sympathizes and takes his side when he is accused of the murder of Sidney Toler.  O’Neill acknowledges his fight for the Sioux has always been an uphill battle.  “Every move I make is blocked by the same organized group that have been bleeding the Indians for years…water power, oil rights, cattle ranges…whatever the Indian happens to own, they manage to get away from them through control of public opinion and legislation….”

O’Neill invites him to state his case in a congressional committee meeting.  Barthelmess explains life on the reservation in strong language when one of the committee members notes that Indians were granted American citizenship in the 1920s during the Calvin Coolidge administration in return for their services during World War I. 

Yes, they weren’t citizens until…the 1920s.

Barthelmess responds, “The Indian a citizen?  That’s funny.  He hasn’t any constitutional rights.  He can’t even hire a lawyer without the agent’s consent.  Oh, he’s given the right to live…on a wasteland.  He’s allowed the right to worship, but if he remembers that the Indian once had a religion of his own, he gets a beating for it.  He’s given the right to love, but a white man can violate an Indian girl and get away with it…You used to shoot the Indian down.  Now you cheat him and starve him and kill him off by dirt and disease.  It’s a massacre any way you tell it.”

These are strong words that probably a lot in the movie audience had never heard before or considered.  He is rewarded with applause, but taken back to the reservation to stand trial for murder.  Wallis Clark plays his lawyer, and they garner massive attention with headlines and crowds when the train pulls into the nearest town to the reservation. 

But Jennie, his sister, is missing.  She has been kidnapped to keep her from testifying about her rape.  With his usual fearless and no-nonsense manner, Barthelmess tracks her down, not afraid to use his fists or tell off anybody.  There is a buildup of suspenseful twists and turns right through to the end of the movie, with mob violence, where Barthelmess must keep his own people in check before they burn down the courthouse. 

The quiet ending of him standing on a cliff, surveying the wide reservation lands is another surprise, for he was shot down in an earlier scene.  Ann Dvorak joins him with a telegram giving him the appointment, should he choose to accept, of being the reservation’s new agent.  He remarks, “Just think of all the time I wasted shooting glass balls and signing autographs.  This is a real job.”

He and Ann will have, we assume, a happier future together, but not an easy one.  It is a satisfying ending, seeing how they are satisfied.

There appear to have been at least a few actual Native Americans in the cast in very small roles.  It would be interesting to find out what people from the native tribal nations thought of this movie, if any of them had been able to see it at the time in 1934. 

You can see it now on YouTube.

  *******************************

Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

It is also here in paperback from Ingram.

And here in hardcover from Ingram.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation. 

 

 

 

 

 

Heat Lightning - 1934

Heat Lightning (1934) is a study of independence and need, remorse and recklessness, and a profound yet subtle quest for redemption.  It is both gritty and yet surprisingly lyrical.  Aline MacMahon has one of her best roles as the dour, protective older sister running a desert truck stop.  The movie is not all hers, but all the characters moving around her like satellites never detract and sometimes don’t even complement her life that much—she is a true loner in heart and mind.  She seems to brush most of them off like flies. We will learn she didn’t start out that way.

This is my entry in the Classic Movie Blog Association’s “Cry Me a River: Tearjerkers Blogathon.”  I hope you’ll have a look at the other great participatingblogs.

As with really great movies, the setting is as much a character in the story as the actors, and director Mervyn LeRoy certainly knows this.  Here we have a weather-beaten diner with a ramshackle car repair garage and a gas pump out front.  There are a few cabins that comprise a small “auto court” of the day.  We are in the Mojave Desert, and just as traveler Jane Darwell remarks when she and her hapless husband, Edgar Kennedy, suffer car trouble and see the roadside café up ahead, “It’ll probably turn out to be a mirage.”

We may well imagine that motorists (or those pushing their enormous cars like Edgar Kennedy), will see the run-down road stop as a welcome respite.  All around them under the big sky is vast, dusty, and with nothing but a long, hot ribbon of highway leading them away from trouble, they hope.

Jane Darwell is the audience proxy when she discovers with surprise that the auto mechanic in the rough clothes is a woman.  She proudly remarks to her bumbling husband, “Only goes to show a woman can do anything she puts her mind to,” as the movie flashes a brief feminist message, though movies of the 1930s, tearjerkers or not, tended to show strong women more than films did in later decades when they mostly seemed to be reduced to victims or vamps.  Life is more complicated than that, and women are more complicated than that, and this is a lesson Aline MacMahon would like to teach to her younger sister, played by Ann Dvorak, but Aline has too many scars to be a graceful teacher.

Another carload of comic characters are the two young ladies boldly off to Hollywood and the middle-aged stranger who gives them a ride.  Played by Muriel Evans and Joan Dennett, they mostly manage to keep Harry C. Bradley diverted from pawing them, but they suffer his dull if smarmy company because it is a free ride.

Another comic trio that pops in but stays overnight are two wealthy divorcees just having left Reno, played by Glenda Farrell and the wonderful Ruth Donnelly (with the silly tongue-twisting name “Mrs. Ashton-Ashley”).  They bicker, insult each other, and make their chauffeur’s life miserable.  He is played by the reliable regular guy Frank McHugh, who has had just about enough of them. 

But lest we mistake this moody film for a comedy, we see early on that the oasis in the desert is not all relief and restoration, where one can guzzle Cokes and eat barbecued sandwiches while Aline MacMahon fixes your car.

Aline’s kid sister, Ann Dvorak, is champing at the bit.  She’s ready for adventure and romance and she’s not going to get it tucked away in this remote desert.  Aline’s contented refuge is Ann’s prison, and there is tension between them when Aline refuses to allow Ann to go to a dance in town with a ne’er-do-well young man, played by Theodore Newton.  He is older than she is, moves in fast company, and Aline knows that Ann would be getting in over her head.

Ann makes plans to sneak out at night and meet the guy down the road.

“You never had any emotions, you never had any fun!” Ann tells her.  But there’s more to Aline than meets the eye.

Enter two strangers, stopping for lunch and a cold beer.  They are city fellows, in suits and Fedoras, and one of them, played by Preston Foster, is friendly, easygoing and searching the place with the keen eyes of someone who knows how to case a joint.  His partner, Lyle Talbot, is less interested and would prefer they got back on the road.

We will learn, drip-by-drip, that they escaped from prison, robbed a bank in Salt Lake City and in the process, Mr. Foster shot to death a couple of cashiers.  He is cool as a cucumber, but Mr. Talbot is increasingly nerve-racked over their deed and the suspense of escape.

Preston Foster sees Aline MacMahon emerge from the garage in her overalls, work shirt, and bandana.  She stops short, stunned to see him.

Ahh, they know each other.

“What are you doing out here?” he asks.

“Making an honest living.  Something you wouldn’t know anything about,” she replies.  They not only know each other, they have a romantic past and it is the reason Miss MacMahon has self-exiled to the Mojave Desert.  Back in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the old days, she was a party girl, and Preston’s girl, and he done her wrong.

Ann Dvorak knows nothing about those days, and Aline wants to keep it that way.  We see that Aline’s admirable self-reliance and rigid work ethic might be penance, as much as a do-over.

Preston Foster takes a sly, calculated interest in rekindling their relationship, but perhaps not so much for love as for what use she can be to him.

When it becomes known that the flighty Ruth Donnelly and Glenda Farrell are traveling with some pretty hefty jewels, Mr. Foster sees his chance to bankroll his and Lyle Talbot’s escape.

But Aline, thinking only that he is pursuing her for herself, brushes him off.  “I’m happy here.  I know what living is about here.  I wouldn’t leave for anything.”  Though Aline gets some strong dialogue, she really doesn’t need it.  With her soulful eyes and quiet intensity, she commands every scene she’s in.  She could attract our attention by just tying her shoes.  “I left you and that whole rotten life.  Don’t you think I’m the same woman who used to eat out of your hand, because I’m not.  I’m a whole lot wiser.” 

Maybe.

Ann Dvorak is curious about her big sister’s relationship with Foster, but Dvorak is more preoccupied with the coming nightfall and her date with the bounder.

Night falls, and the men delay leaving, to Talbot’s increasing anxiety, particularly when the sheriff pops in to see if anybody heard anything of the escaping criminals.  The desert may cool off a bit, but heat lightning flashes in the distance.  A happy Mexican family camps out, and when a rancher from nearby shows up, played by Willard Robertson, who would be Aline’s suitor if she let him, we see another side to Aline MacMahon. She dresses up for the first time in probably many months, and entertains the two men interested in her, sitting outside in the night breeze, while her sister is away.  She is not flirtatious, but she is womanly and letting her beaus see that they each have competition.

Late that evening, when all is quiet, Ann Dvorak’s date brings her back, drops her off down the road. She is clearly infatuated with him, and he appears bored with her, and we might assume that he has taken his pleasure and now wants nothing to do with her.

She sneaks back into the rooms she shares with her sister behind the diner and catches Preston Foster sneaking out of Aline MacMahon’s bedroom.  Aha!  Ann smirks slightly.  It is a revelation about her stern, puritanical older sister.  Reportedly, this scene also got the film bad marks from the National Legion of Decency.

Having left Aline, Foster now purposefully goes to work on the safe with Lyle Talbot.  The safe in the diner is where Donnelly’s and Farrell’s jewels were put for the night.

Aline goes to Ann’s room, knowing that she sneaked out, and the sisters fight, and Ann throws Aline’s tryst with Preston Foster in her face.  But Ann is not triumphant over her sister's apparent hypocrisy; she is devastated, for as Aline begins to surmise, Ann is now, also, “a whole lot wiser.”

Aline, knowing the torture of resisting a man she really wants, tenderly embraces her sister, strokes her hair, understanding that her sister has also been ill-used by a man this night.  As she puts her crying sister to bed, and kisses her shoulder, she hears noise from the diner. 

Foster and Talbot are having trouble with the safe, and Foster is having trouble with Talbot.  Lyle doesn’t want to stay any longer and doesn’t want to do any more harm, but Foster is adamant. 

“You get that safe open. I didn't spend all that time with the dame for nothing.”

Uh-oh.

Miss MacMahon enters, with a gun, and shoots Foster.  After he drops, after a moment, she goes to him, her hair loose and long out of the familiar bandana.  She is quiet, shocked, and his last words, “I had it coming.”

Talbot asks, “What about me?”

She lets him go.

When others come at the sound of the shot, she wearily brushes them off, telling them she shot at a rat.

In the morning, when the guests leave and Ann is back to work in the garage, rancher Willard Robertson returns, concerned for her.  She shows him the body and asks him to take care of it, to tell the sheriff.

He tenuously asks if Foster meant anything to her.  She is honest and says he did, once.

He offers, somewhat cruelly, “Must be a big help sometimes being like you, Olga, not having any feeling.”

“I wouldn’t know, Everett.”

A newcomer arrives, like so many others, pleased at finding the diner and garage and auto court and says, “This place is sure a lifesaver, lady.”

She agrees it’s a pretty quiet life.

The Hollywood studio system of the day gave us plenty of froth and fluff, but was extraordinary in its ability to turn out so many quiet stories of powerful substance, and describing what life was like during the Great Depression in so many, many ways.

Please have a look at the other blogs posting in the Classic Movie Blog Association’s “Cry Me a River: Tearjerkers Blogathon” here.

  *******************************

Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation.