One Who Walked Alone

Lisa and I watched The Whole Wide World last night (yes, I occasionally take breaks from writing to do other stuff). If you're not familiar with it, the film covers the final four years of pulp writer Robert E. Howard's life. Based on his sometime-girlfriend Novalyne Price's memoir One Who Walked Alone, the film takes its name from a Howard friend who introduces him as "The greatest pulp writer in the whole wide world."

I'm not the Howard buff like my friend Mark Finn, so I can't comment on the accuracy, but I really am moved to get the book the film was based on and read more about this man's tragic life. The movie simply feels authentic. There's not a plot to speak of, rather, the film unfolds into a series of events that dovetail into the next until the end is reached. Pretty much the way things work in real life. And I have to give a hearty recommendation to the attention paid to the period details in this film. For rural, 1930s Texas, they hit the nail on the head. This isn't a John Ford western with Monument Valley in the background. There are intermittent forests, miles of cornfields, old sharecropper shacks... They nail it. In fact, for a while I was convinced they'd filmed on location in Cross Plains, since I've been through there several times (never had a chance to stop at the Howard home, unfortunately) and the setting looked the part. So it came as only a mild surprise to read in the credits that it was filmed in Austin (the Paramount Theatre), Bastrop (my wife's hometown) and Bartlett. Actually, Bartlett was the least surprising of the locations. That tiny town has a vintage "main street" that has been used in quite a few period films, notably the Robert Duvall picture The Stars Fell on Henrietta. Lisa and I know these places fairly well, so we're going to watch the movie again and try and place all those locations that felt familiar when we saw them the first time.

But anyway, the movie is good. And tragic. Watch it when you get a chance.

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