Heat Lightning (1934); Highway West (1941)

Heat Lightning was directed by Mervyn LeRoy and Highway West by William C. McGann; both movies were made by Warner Brothers from a play by George Abbot and Leon Abrams.  The major differences between the two films were the result of the Production Code, not quite in effect in 1934, very much in effect in 1941.  The plots are similar but in Heat Lightning a woman kills her lover and allows his fellow bank robber to escape and there is a great deal of sex between unmarried couples, while in Highway West there is no sex and the man is killed by a third person.

The story is rather similar to Robert Sherwood's Petrified Forest, made into a film by Archie Mayo in 1937:  bank robbers hide out in a motel (called an auto camp in Heat Lightning) run by two sisters in the California desert.  One of the sisters (Aline McMahon in the first film, Brenda Marshall in the later film) has escaped  her lover and has been hiding; in the case of Brenda Marshall she was actually married and we get a bit of a backstory about how she learned her husband was a bank robber. Heat and sex are emphasized in the LeRoy film while the McGann is more of a straightforward crime story.  In Heat Lightning Aline McMahon, who usually played spinster aunts, is an expert at repairing motorcars but gives in to passion when her past lover suddenly shows up and she succumbs to him, only to shoot him when she finds out he was just using her in order to rob the place. McGann's film is more literal than LeRoy's, who emphasizes facial and body expressions rather than the overheated dialogue of McGann's film, though both directors use a mobile camera (Ted McCord is the ;cinematographer for Highway West and Sid Hickox for Heat Lightning).  Ann Dvorak plays the sister, desperate to get away and have sex,  to Aline McMahon while Olympe Bradna played Brenda Marshall's sister.

Mervyn LeRoy directed a number of gritty movies for Warner Brothers (Little Caesar and Five Star Final, both in 1932) before going on to bloated epics such as Quo Vadis (1951).  William McGann made 55 B films, mostly for Warner Brothers, between 1930 and 1944.