Tweet London, UK 17 Oct: HEAT LIGHTNING (1934) + JEWEL ROBBERY (19

BFI Southbank
BFI London Film Festival
6pm, 17 October 2012

Heat Lightning
Director Mervyn LeRoy
With Aline MacMahon, Ann Dvorak, Preston Foster
USA 1934
64 mins

Jewel Robbery
Director-Producer William Dieterle
Screenwriter Bertram Bloch, Erwin S Gelsey
With William Powell, Kay Francis, Helen Vinson
USA 1932
68 mins

Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation.

This racy duo of crime comedy-dramas from Warner Bros continues treasures’ exploration of the almost-forgotten, low-budget, gritty pre-Code movies made in the early 1930s when sound confused the censors, crisply restored by the Library of Congress motion Picture Department. Heat Lightning (condemned on release by the Catholic Legion of Decency) centres on Olga, who runs a gas station, lunch counter and auto camp in the mojave Desert with her younger sister myra. Myra wants to run off with her cad of a beau, while George, an old boyfriend, has his eye on the jewels worn by a couple of passing divorcees. Jewel Robbery stars suave William Powell as a quick-witted, non-violent gentleman thief who charms the adventurous wife of a boring Viennese baron and (as it says on the tin) plans a daring daylight jewel robbery. The reliable Mervyn LeRoy and redoubtable William Dieterle directed respectively. (Notes: Clyde Jeavons)

https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/d ... :linkName=

The writer of the notes would have been better off giving the dollar amount production cost of the movies instead of calling them "low budget." The budget for these two movies is probably about $150,000 each, which was a lot of money in 1932 and in 1934 as well. Warner Bros. had cut in half the salary of many of its non-unionized studio employees, cuts it finally eliminated in 1933 under pressure from AMPAS (now know for its Academy Awards but then AMPAS's primary job was to keep unionization of Hollywood studio employees at bay).

I wonder if the Library of Congress version of "Heat Lightning," showing in London, was what Warner Archive used to make its DVD-R release of the movie, labelled on the box cover as "remastered."