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Ask The Dusk - John Fante: An Unsentimental Look at the Life of a Struggling Writer Trying to Exist in Depression-era Los Angeles

Robert Towne, writer of the masterpiece Chinatown, knows pre-war Los Angeles. He recreates the pre-war Los Angeles of John Fante's 1939 novel Ask the Dusk in the 2006 film of the same name, starring Colin Farrell as Fante's alter ego, virginal writer Arturo Bandini, and Salma Hayek as the Mexican waitress he falls in love with. Fante's novel is a merciless portrait of an inexperience writer seeking fame and fortune in California while living in a seedy hotel with disenchanted Midwesterners. Despite Towne's respect for the author and the novel, his adaptation of the film attempts to be faithful to the novel but its switching of focus undermines the novel's original focus. Instead of showing us the tortured travels through Los Angeles that comprise the journey of Bandini, the film makes the romance between Arturo and Camilla the main story.

The novel Ask the Dusk is an unsentimental look at the life of a struggling writer trying to exist in Depression-era Los Angeles. Living in the vermin-filled Alta Loma hotel, in the novel we see a life of despair surrounds Bandini, who is also being tormented as a poor, struggling writer. As Fante's (46) Bandini says of getting sucked into the Southern California myth of paradise, "You'll eat hamburgers year after year and live in dusky, vermin-infested apartments and hotels but you'll still be in paradise boys, land of sunshine." Spectacularly, Towne's film is faithful to the recreation of this dour version of pre-war Los Angeles, even though the film was entirely shot in South African locations using sets and digital technology.

Despite Towne being quite faithful to the dialogue from Fante's novel, he undermines the original by adding elements of his own that make the movie more about a romance than a struggling writer's tormented odyssey through pre-war Los Angeles. Instead of the hostile and masochistic relationship in the novel, the romance between Camille ...

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Ask The Dusk - John Fante: An Unsentimental Look at the Life of a Struggling Writer Trying to Exist in Depression-era Los Angeles. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 10:51, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/2001021.html