Desert Hearts

A stuffy professor heads to Reno for a quickie divorce and becomes infatuated with a young woman who lives at the ranch where she's staying. Helen Shaver and Patricia Charbonneau have sizzling chemistry as the romantic leads and this film has a nice distinction of being one of the few lesbian themed films that doesn't end in appalling tragedy or sugary sweetness. It's down to earth, smart, sexy, and incredibly entertaining.

When it comes to love movies - usually we get a man loves a woman and hopefully vice versa. In this case we get two women ... or at least one that is quite sure what she wants and who she loves. At a time when love like that was more than just forbidden .... and even those who may have feelings of ... well let's just say even they had issues to deal with those things.

A womans touch - no pun intended - something the movie really needed and profited from. I'm not saying that a man wouldn't have done a solid job with the source novel, but you feel that it was crucial to have a woman for this. Not just for the intimate scenes. This really is an underrated movie, with superb performances - not just for the time it was made, but in general.

I'm a straight male and I feel the movie was done very tastefully (not a pun) and had a nice story. It wasn't supposed to be an action flick, but it does have a good story though I would have preferred to see it go a little deeper emotionally, but you have to understand that this was a "period" film and given the era the movie was set in, the emotions of the characters make perfect sense. In the 50's and especially in the rural areas, people were very conservative and though a character like Cay would've wanted to be open about her lifestyle, she certainly would've felt restrained to do so, even as free-spirited as she was. And Vivian would certainly have initially felt like a leper as the tug of societal demands and the mores of the era weighed on her. I think it was filmed and written in exactly the same light as it needed to be, no more, no less. A very realistic portrait of the era and a great job, no doubt about it, and highly recommended for viewing, but I would rate it "R" for about 5-10 minutes of sex scenes, maybe "PG-13" for content.

As for the sex scenes, I can't imagine anyone not enjoying it, whatever your orientation. I did, and I'm straight as an arrow (no pun intended there either!)

See how much this out-of-print video sells for on the Net and you'll see the demand this movie still creates, which is more of a barometer of its success than anything else. I can't believe that it ever went out-of-print given the demand for it. You don't see that with just any video, and as a minor collector of rare videos I can say that for a fact.

"Desert Hearts" has quite a bit going for it. It captures 1950s Reno and environs, the biggest little city in the world, pretty well: great old cars, red earth, dried twisted windspent driftwood, fragrant summer sagebrush, the noisy 7/24 casinos with 99 cent meals, suntanned faces, rickety ranch motels on the outskirts of town, snow-veined Sierras, and the pop music that is no worse than what we listen to. The story pulls one in.

Aura Lindley is the matriarch of the ranch and has bonded with one of her tenants. A new one arrives, an Eastern sophisticate, who refers to herself as a "distinguished author," and has a lot of books schlepped into her room. Discord! Helen Shaver, the professor, is rather neat and in addition to her books carries around a lot of savoir-faire. She doesn't look bad either. The movie also has going for it the presence of Patricia Charbonneau, who must have one of the most interesting crania on the planet, and the soft parts to match. She is possessed of a sinewy yet feminine figure and carries herself with presence. Her hair and her irises are the color of glowing anthracite. ("Charbonneau", indeed.) And those dazzling big choppers, appalling and appealing. She outs herself on a walk with Shaver who responds momentarily, impulsively. Jealous, Lindley throws Shaver out, suspecting something more intimate has happened than actually has.

The intimacy follows in a later scene when Charbonneau tracks Shaver to her downtown hotel room and initiates a long, erotic love scene which isn't at all pornographic or exploitative. The two women love one another, but one is after all an uptight distinguished author and the other, though equally intelligent, goes with the flow, as they say, and has been "kicked out of college for unnatural acts."

The film ends ambiguously. Can they get together? Can they compromise their life styles? Can a distinguished author carry on an affair with another woman in the 1950s? Not including Gertrude Stein? Can our desert wildflower find a home as a potted plant surrounded by geraniums on a windowsill on MacDougall Street in the Village? Will an author find happiness with a woman after her marriage to a man has ended in boredom and disaster? Will -- I forgot what the original rhetorical question was.

This is an easy movie to get through. Nothing in it leaps out at you. It doesn't pound you over the head with its modern sensibilities. We're not invited to condemn those morons back in the 50s for their attitudes towards gays, nor are we urged to feel guilty because we are accused of some lingering distaste ourselves. The movie sort of shrugs at these issues and says, well, that's the way it was. Not exactly a time that embraced gays but, at least on the outskirts of Reno, not exactly a time of torture either. One wishes Shaver and Charbonneau well as they ride off on the train into the sunset.

I've seen this movie at least a dozen times and it never fails to make me cry. It's a simple love story, but the fact that it's two women in love in Nevada in the 1950's gives it special significance. Unlike a lot of lesbian movies that were made in the 1980's, this one isn't all doom and gloom. It's actually a movie that will make you remember being young, impulsive and in love. It leaves the

viewer feeling hopeful about the future. Vivian Bell is a professor who comes to Nevada in the 1950's for a quickie divorce from her husband. While there she

meets Cay Rivers and Cay opens up a whole new world to her and makes

Vivian realize there's more to life than her stuffy, professional existence in New York. In addition, this movie has the most touching, intimate, erotic, and soulful love scene that I have EVER seen between 2 women in a movie.