Cinema: Nothing Applies

PLAY IT AS IT LAYS

Directed by FRANK PERRY Screenplay by JOAN DIDION and JOHN GREGORY DUNNE

Better stop, look around

Here it comes, here it comes

Here comes your 19th nervous

breakdown.

—The Rolling Stones

Los Angeles is a cul-de-sac at the end of the continent. With the desert before it, the ocean beyond it, there is nowhere left to go. Even the sun is seductive, sinister somehow, sapping life instead of giving it.

Raymond Chandler knew the territory well, Nathanael West wrote of it brilliantly in The Day of the Locust, but no one has...