her that she has been writing only about her hunger for love. Presently, with a flaming offshore oil well in the background, he offers her a chance at the real thing, fulfillment, and the downward path to wisdom. She declines. Subplots take over. A hurricane is coming. Jaguar convertibles race through the night. A dog chews peanut butter. The oil well explodes. The hurricane strikes. All very authentic, and in the end the lady gratefully changes her mind.
The moral of which is, wouldn’t it be cheaper for Hollywood filmmakers to reverse their strategy, and do their traveling inside people, instead of outside places? The more emphasis a movie places on background, the less impetus it seems to have to bother with the people it’s about. Some of the finest postwar films we’ve had—Sunset Boulevard, The Night of the Hunter, This Could Be the Night, The Wild One, to name a quartet that come casually to mind —were made entirely without benefit of transoceanic landscapes. What they did have, though, were persuasive, personal inscapes, and knowledgeable insight into some aspect of human love, or need, or both.
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