The nearest approximation might be Roland Emmerich’s 2004 The Day After Tomorrow, which opens with the sun blazing over Antarctica. Strangely, however, there is yet to be a big-budget disaster movie centred squarely on a prolonged, deadly heatwave, even as such events are growing alarmingly more common in life.
These are generally understood to show the aftermath of nuclear war, but changing weather as such can also play a role in turning the world into a desert wasteland – something Miller made more explicit when he revived the series in 2014’s Mad Max: Fury Road, where water is portrayed as the most precious of all commodities. Something similar is true of post-apocalyptic films like those in George Miller’s Mad Max series. The oppressive heat stands in for an enemy that is nowhere and everywhere – accentuating all the physical frustrations of ageing, and ensuring that even in the most familiar context nothing works in the way they've come to expect.
All sorts of characters can succumb to this madness, as they do in the plays of Tennessee Williams and their screen adaptations, where the heat is sometimes felt even in the titles: Suddenly Last Summer, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.īut where Hollywood is concerned, the most frequent victims seem to be white middle-class men of a certain age, like those played by Jack Lemmon in Melvin Frank’s 1975 black comedy The Prisoner of Second Avenue or Michael Douglas in Joel Schumacher’s 1993 vigilante drama Falling Down.īoth are recently unemployed white collar workers, full of rage at their loss of status but with no clear idea who to blame. Heat can drive a person crazy, the movies teach us – or, at least, it can bring a simmering madness to the boil. In similar hallucinatory fashion, heat can provide an alibi for a blurring of the distinction between reality and fantasy – as in Billy Wilder’s 1955 comedy The Seven Year Itch, where the married hero (Tom Ewell) spends his summer guiltily lusting after his upstairs neighbour, played by no less than Marilyn Monroe.Įlizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. But we feel the heat rising, in the tanned, sweaty faces of the men, and in details like a buzzing fly or the drip of water from a leaky tank, while the distortion of space created by an anamorphic lens suggests that the celluloid itself is starting to warp and buckle. Virtually nothing happens for 10 minutes or more. Time can stretch right out, as in the famous opening sequence of Sergio Leone’s 1968 Once Upon A Time In The West: three desperados awaiting the arrival of a train, at a ramshackle station in the middle of nowhere. In truth, heat in cinema is often paradoxical: it can ramp things up while also slowing them down, allowing us to bask in each moment.
“People dress different, feel different, they sweat more, wake up cranky and never recover … Everything’s just a little askew.”Ī scene from the 1968 film Once Upon A Time In The West. Preston) of the Florida heatwave in Lawrence Kasdan’s 1981 neo-noir Body Heat. “It’s a crisis atmosphere,” says a police detective (J.A. Hot weather, in cinema, is never just hot weather: it’s a whole climate, an emotional and visual tonality, a vibe. Not that the distinction between the literal and the metaphoric is that clear-cut, either here or in later films that use heatwaves in a similar way, from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window to Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing. Spanning roughly 24 hours at the height of summer, the action is confined to a single setting – out the front of a New York tenement, where residents who have fled their stuffy apartments meet to gossip, squabble and air their views on the issues of the day.ĭramatically, the heat serves a dual purpose: as a means of literally forcing the characters into the open, and as a metaphor for the tensions that result. The film is King Vidor’s 1931 Street Scene, based on a play of the same name that won a Pulitzer Prize two years earlier. The Dry, starring Eric Bana, hinges on the contrast between two kinds of Australian summer.