Desert Hearts

Another of the movies that I recorded from the September 2025 TCM salute to the UCLA Film and Television Archive was Desert Hearts. It's got a showing tonight (June 29) at 11:15 PM as part of TCM's "Pride" movie day, so I figured now would be a good time to schedule this post that had been lying in my drafts in conjunction with the TCM showing.

It's 1959, and getting off a train in Reno, NV, is Vivian Bell (Helen Shaver). Reno in those days of course meant the place the people go to when they're looking to get a divorce since the divorce laws in other states still hadn't been liberalized. Vivian is an English professor at a college in New York, in a marriage with a man who was more or less just a friend at the time they got married, with no real plans to have children or anything. The two have basically just drifted apart, so a divorce is apparently the best thing. (We never see Vivian's husband.) She has come out to Reno for the requisite several weeks of residency and will be spending them at a ranch-type place that's been converted to tourism and partly to accommodate the sort of woman who is looking to fulfill the residency requirement for that divorce.

The place is run by Frances Parker (Audra Lindley), who is a widow with an adult son Walter and stepdaughter Cay (Patricia Charbonneau). Walter works solely for Mom, while Cay has a job on the outside, making change for the sort of pathetic people who go to one of the lesser casinos to play the slot machines, a job she shares with her best friend Silver (Andra Akers). Silver is planning on geting married to Art, while Cay is being pursued romantically by her boss Darrell (Dean Butler). They're advances that Cay has decided she really doesn't want.

That's because Cay is a lesbian, and is relatively open about it for 1959 and a place like Reno. This is going to cause some serious issues with her stepmom later in the film. Cay is also in some ways very much a product of the west at a time when there were much greater cultural differences between the various regions of the United States. So the sudden presence of an urbane New Yorker like Vivian is bound to shake things up.

Cay is one of those way too extroverted people who immediately starts to befriend Vivian who, for various reasons, is a bit repressed. After all, she is there for a divorce, and starting a relationshp with anybody could theoretically be seen as giving her husband grounds to make the divorce settlement less in her favor. Never mind that this being 1959, she probably hasn't had any openly lesbian friends before.

But Cay makes Vivian realize that she might in fact be lesbian or at least bi, which would also explain the fairly loveless marriage, even though she's also rather reluctant to consummate the relationship. Cay's pursuit of Vivian also makes Frances extremely uncomfortable. And there's also the fact that Vivian is going to have to return to New York eventually since she does have that job waiting for her next semester.

Desert Hearts isn't a bad movie by any stretch of the imaginaton. But I can't help but think that, had the story been about some sort of heterosexual relationship -- say, the woman going out to Reno and finding a nice man who falls in love with her on the rebound -- it would be the sort of movie that would have gone in an out of theaters, largely forgotten because it doesn't do anything anyone could consider groundbreaking. Part of that, though is down to the low budget; I have a feeling that it the director had wanted to do a more mainstream heterosexual relationship film funding would have been easier to come by. Still, as long as you're OK with the fact that it has a fairly explicit sex scene, Desert Hearts is one that's worth one watch at least.