The screen's future Hopalong Cassidy William Boyd starred in this early talkie with Carole Lombard. High Voltage teams the two of them as they're stuck in an abandoned church during a blizzard in the High Sierras.
Lombard is a fugitive going back with Detective Owen Moore to face trial and imprisonment on a bus which would today just qualify as a van. Two other passengers are young bride Diane Ellis and banker Phillips Smalley. Driver Billy Bevan rather stupidly decides to push on and gets stuck in the snow drifts. Fortunately there's a church isolated out there that they can see and they make for it for shelter.
Where they find it's already occupied by William Boyd who is far from the cowboy hero of Hopalong Cassidy. In fact Boyd is a wanted fugitive and he's got a cache of food for himself alone and he's not looking for company to share it.
Of course being stuck the way they are nature takes its course and Lombard finds a way to melt poor Boyd in all that snow.
For a film entitled High Voltage not much electricity was being generated from the team of Lombard and Boyd. It looked to me like the whole cast was a bit nervous of the new sound motion pictures. Phillips Smalley in a voice that might have been dubbed sings a lyric tenor number to keep the group entertained and Billy Bevan who was a music hall entertainer in his native Australia as well as the United Kingdom did a couple of numbers as well on the church piano. They were the highlights of the film.
Fans of Carole Lombard might want to check this out to see her in a very early sound film and Hoppy fans might want to see Bill Boyd in another role, but High Voltage should not generate too much interest elsewhere.
