The Heat is on Screen

Being as we just cleared the first day of Summer, let’s talk HOT. To get in the mood for the weather that's about to swallow us whole throughout July and August, let’s talk about some sweat-drenched people. Let’s talk about the kind of body heat – but not Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (too easy) – that might have caused Al Pacino to tell Jonathan Pryce (in Glengarry Glen Ross) that "it was so hot in the city today, grown men were walking up to cops on street corners begging them to shoot them.”

I’m not going to look at the obvious choices like Fahrenheit 451 or Backdraft. Nothing that features out-and-out fire making people hot. Or Anthony Hopkins in Nixon. Just too easy.

Nor will I be discussing Tom Cruise’s long, hot Top Gun volleyball game where his glistening pec-sweat brought audiences out in droves. Or that errant droplet of sweat that almost betrays an upside down Tom Cruise to his pursuer in The Firm. Or the one three summers later that almost gets Tom Cruise caught as he dangles above the secret computer at CIA HQ in Mission: Impossible (he catches it in his gloved hand with the most satisfying water drip sound you’ve ever heard). So we’re clear: There will be no references to Tom Cruise’s sweat throughout the rest of this column. Public Service Announcement over.

A quick Google search reveals that there are no websites that track movies featuring characters that sweat. (Actually, I'm kind of glad that's the case.) Because film is a visual medium, sweat can be crucial to communicating - for instance - the overwhelming humidity of a locale. And because sweat can be perceived as either a good thing (exiting impurities, cooling the skin) or a bad thing (panic, anxiety, overheating), it is also versatile. Just like Tom Cruise. Wait a minute.

The heat is palpable in Spike Lee's watershed Do the Right Thing, a film you could measure on the sweat-o-meter (just invented this minute) using the gallon mark rather than the inch mark. (Watershed, by the way = pun.)

The heat is meant to be stifling, as it underscores the pot boiling tectonic shift that is about to occur in a racially diverse Brooklyn neighborhood whose pizza shop is the central hang out and, as it turns out, the central location of the film's deeply upsetting climax.

The pizza shop has a delivery person - Mookie, played by none other than Spike Lee himself - who, at one point, drizzles an ice cube over his girlfriend to cool her down. As it melts, we begin to see the momentary relief from the heat - and the sweat - that only comes when everyone stops what they are doing and takes the time to heal themselves. This won't happen again onscreen until the sober next morning that follows the climax I made reference to. Outside Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, you'd be hard pressed to find a film where high temperature is so genuinely palpable.

There are two great films from the far east that feature characters ensconced in sweat, both of which are worth checking out if you are patient (Blissfully Yours) and/or open-minded (The Wayward Cloud).

Blissfully Yours hails from Thailand, eschews narrative almost by definition, and features characters whose sweating almost seems to confirm their complete and utter ease.

The starting point involves a factory worker who fakes sick to leave work (and spend the day with a lover), but nearly the entire running time is spent in the jungle, where the couple laze about - at one point, falling asleep on camera - and enjoy the fruits of nothingness. Because it is so hot, they pour sweat from their pores, almost ironically, as they are barely moving.

The Wayward Cloud, on the other hand, takes place in Taiwan during a water shortage. The main characters originally appeared in the same director's What Time is It There?, a quirky film where the main character escapes his humdrum life by changing all the clocks in the city to mirror the time in Paris, where a woman he is in love with has gone to.

While The Wayward Cloud burns up the residue of harmless whim left by What Time is It There? - the male character is now an adult film actor and struggles to connect with the woman who initially went to Paris - it does feature a unique multimedia strategy involving rampant sex, watermelon, and sudden, madcap musical sequences.

The characters seem to sweat a great deal (enough that it stuck with me), and I felt as if the sweat were a visual cue meant to stand in for the lack of vitality present in this waterless world of theirs. By the end of the film, things become almost blatantly interpretive, which gives me what I believe is due license to make this claim. At your own risk, but certainly unique.

Then there's the terrific sequence in David Lean's undisputed masterwork Bridge on the River Kwai where Saito (Hayakawa) forces Nicholson (Alec Guinness) into "the oven", which is a tiny metal box left out in tropical heat. After nearly a day of no food or water inside the sweltering chamber of punishment, Nicholson is more sweat than man.

The most famous things about the film are typically its catchy whistling tune and its powerful ending (referenced in the title), but this scene - where the cruelty of man is especially lucid - has always stuck with me.

I'll admit that I have a strange preoccupation with human beings being imprisoned - sick fascination with prison movies, too - but the sheer impossibility of enduring such torture (followed directly by his surviving it, naturally) left me feeling like Nicholson was invincible. Twenty years later, Guinness would just have needed the Force to get out. In 1957, he was after proving the point.

Both of Darabont's Stephen King adaptations - The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile - feature their share of sweat, but I really love the way The Green Mile opens. Tom Hanks is battling a urinary tract infection, seeking sweet relief, and sweat - like a leaky faucet - is mocking him as it drips down his forehead.

Most of the film seems to take place in the heat, but that character introduction sequence, where Hanks' body seems to be contradicting itself, lends a bracing humanity to the man. Hanks himself always radiates a je ne sais quoi of humanness, but that sweaty smile - as he finally begins urinating - is a wonderful oomph that immediately defines him as man with all the same frailties and vulnerabilities we all possess. Which makes sense in the context of a film about a gentle giant with otherworldly healing powers.

While I'm not a huge fan of The Green Mile – it’s framed in the same template as Shawshank, only achingly deliberate - the other films I've listed here are all worth a watch. Yes: Even the Tom Cruise pictures.