We are in the middle of a global heat wave where Miami has a heat index of 106 degrees and Montreal, where I recently visited, was under a heat warning of 91 degrees. Walking through the city before the rain cooled it all down, I could feel it and I’ve been around worse. Hence, I’m inside and I hope all of you are safe from the sun. In the movies, extreme heat has been portrayed as a perfect setting that reflects the personal nature of people besides being part of mother nature. It cannot be avoided, even when inside sometimes. Here are a few of those films where the heat can be sensed emanating off the screen onto us.
Greed (1925)
Within the Erich von Stroheim masterpiece about a man who wins money and then becomes psychologically attached to every dollar, he has a punishing ending that rings poetic. In the desert, his two surviving male characters are fighting to kill each other with a bag of cash out of reach. For two months during the summer, production was shot in Death Valley, arguably the hottest place on Earth, during the summer, with temperatures well over 100 degrees. Wanting to be as authentic as possible, instead of being close to Los Angeles, the film was shot 100 miles from the nearest populated town with temperatures recorded to be as high as 123 degrees. Heat exhaustion was common and numerous members of the crew were sent back home to recover.
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
David Lean went all out in taking his film to the deserts of Spain, Morocco, and Jordan where the blistering heat is all on Super Panavision’s 65 mm. Sun blisters, thirst, and the difficulty of running through the dunes are all captured through the breathtaking cinematography of Freddie A. Young, who won an Oscar for his work. Sequences such as crossing the Sinai to reach the port town of Aqaba from behind, considered impossible and nicknamed, “The Devil’s Anvil,”, just drains the energy out of you to consider this crossing madness. Of course, the legendary jump cut of the sunrise captures how exotic Arabia can be, but the full sunshine captures its brutality.
Walkabout (1971)
Nicholas Roeg made his directorial debut by going out into the Australian Outback and leading two children, who survive their father’s attempt to kill them, into the wilderness. Alone and struggling with thirst, an Aboriginal boy (the late, great David Gulpilil) finds them and takes them on his own trek where they survive through traditionalist ways. Roeg himself was a cinematographer and did the camerawork with all the hypnotic shots, capturing the allegory of the Garden of Eden with its counterculture themes of nature against modern civilization.
Do The Right Thing (1989)
The heat of social consciousness and tempers matches the temperature of a summer’s day in Brooklyn, courtesy of Spike Lee. While fire is the consuming source of heat at the film’s climax, the actual sun causes people to toast and burn up their own personal feelings as their violent tendencies rise. To make it even more obvious, the street where the movie was shot had sets filled with red and orange to match the day. While the pizzeria was a set built on a lot, the ovens were actually functional. Everyone is looking for shade the best way they can, but there is no hiding.
The Hurt Locker (2009)
Katheryn Bigelow’s Oscar-winning war drama in Iraq zeroes in on a bomb unit squad who go in under the immediate threat of explosion to deactivate all weapons. Jeremy Renner made his breakthrough sweating heavily in his bomb suit as he has difficulty disarming all of them while his character shows off his ego by baking in the job. The heat does not bother him but certainly does his fellow soldiers under the constant pressure of ambush and the grotesque scenarios that threaten everyone. The scene that stands out the most is when the number of tons in the trunk of a car is discovered and Renner’s character drops his tools in shock. He takes off the suit, saying, “If I’m going to die, I wanna die comfortably.”
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