A flop George Abbott play gets a very respectable Warners filming in this 1934 B, which is boosted by two of the strongest women then on the lot, Aline MacMahon and Ann Dvorak. They're sisters, one butch and practical and the other feminine and yearning, running an out-of-the-way garage/cafe/hotel in the Southwest, not far from the Mexican border. Warners contract players keep dropping in, from Glenda Farrell to Frank McHugh to Ruth Donnelley, but bad news enters in the form of Preston Foster and Lyle Talbot. Dumb luck puts them there, in the first of a couple of unlikely coincidences, for it turns out Foster, generally an uninteresting actor who's unusually heated and virile here, had a long-ago tryst with MacMahon, and now he and Talbot have just robbed a bank and killed a couple of clerks. A short movie, it's a little light on plot but soaked in convincing studio atmosphere, with the titular heat lightning going off in the distance, and firmly steered by Mervyn LeRoy. MacMahon, "one of the screen's few perfect actresses," as film historian David Shipman had it, sinks her teeth into a meaty part and says more with an eyebrow than most actresses could say with pages of dialogue, and Dvorak is appealing in a somewhat hackneyed part. The rest of the Warners stock company do their usual things: Donnelley is haughty, Farrell flirty, McHugh the comic relief. But that's not to say they're unwelcome.
Review of Heat Lightning
