HEATWAVE! (1974)

It's Los Angeles in the 1970s, it's summer, and it's 112 degrees—and it's been that way for days. Young husband Ben Murphy wakes up in the morning, already sweaty and uncomfortable, to discover the bedroom air conditioning unit has stopped working. While he showers, his pregnant wife (Bonnie Bedelia) finds that the tap water has turned brown. At work, just as Murphy's boss is about to give him a promotion, the entire office is ordered to shut down for the duration of the heat wave to save resources. Bedelia's folks have offered them the use of their mountain cabin to escape the heat; Murphy resents his in-laws for making him feel inadequate but soon they feel they have no other choice. On the way up, Murphy stops to help a man attend to his heat-stricken wife, but the man winds up stealing Murphy's car so the two endure a long, sweltering hike only to discover that 1) the heat is just as bad up in the mountains, and 2) a fire has knocked out all the power. Not to mention that their cabin already has occupants: a young couple who found the back door unlocked. What could happen next? Yes, Bedelia, only seven months pregntant, goes into labor.

On the surface, this seems like a typical 70s disaster movie, albeit on a small scale since it was made for television. Modern day viewers would expect scenes of panic verging on the apocalyptic and at least a cursory attempt to blame the heat on climate change. But given the TV movie genre conventions, the era, and the low budget, what we get is basically a domestic melodrama with the climate phenomenon settling into the background, as issues such as career advancement and family tensions become the focus. To be clear, we're never allowed to forget the heat, mostly because of the visual representation of sweat—on Murphy's yellow t-shirt, in Bedelia's mussed-up hair, and on everyone's face. But the last half-hour is all about Bedelia's baby—once she delivers him, prematurely, the doctor (Lew Ayres) says that he needs an incubator to survive, but of course, there is no incubator and no power, so the climax is centered on whether or not Murphy, having already been symbolically emasculated a couple of times, can "man up" and save the child. [Spoiler: he can, with a little help from others. Also, the final shot is of rain falling, apparently signaling the end of the heat, with no attempt made at any time to explain why this has happened.] Murphy and Bedelia are very good, and David Huddleston is fine as a beer salesman who seems to befriend the couple but who then acts selfishly later before finally, with no apparent motivation, coming to their aid. Though the print on YouTube isn't great, I stuck with it because I like Murphy (pictured above in full sweat); unless you are already a fan of 70s TV-movies, you can probably skip it. [YouTube]