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When Walker shows up, the pretty production assistant who has been assigned to keep him and his bad influence away from Lu Anne complains about the surrounding dullness: "This is all very tame stuff, if you ask me. Outside of the usual drunks. It's so tranquil and businesslike it's almost boring." Walker remarks, "That could change overnight." But before he sets his catastrophe in motion, Stone displays an intriguing cast of behind-the-screen characters. The director, Walter Drogue Jr., is the son of another director, "a man from the mists of legend, a contemporary of Walsh and Sturges and Hawkes." For reasons not entirely clear, the old man is on the set and becoming interested in the nubile woman who is Lu Anne's stand-in. "Maybe there's something there, eh?" he asks his son. "Maybe nature didn't intend her for just an extra." Drogue the younger replies, "Nature intended her for a water spaniel. She can't name the days of the week."
Nearly everyone on this set seems to have an entertainingly mean mouth. The old director proves a match for his son when it comes to exchanging insults: "Some people are brought up in poverty," he notes casually, "and they become cultivated people. Others grow up spoiled rotten with luxury and become guttersnipes." And when Dongan Lowndes, who has fallen heavily off the wagon, says that "the world can get on quite well" without a film version of his novel, Walker offers a laconic thought: "If we get into what the world can do without . . . God knows where we'll end."
Stone is as adept as ever at portraying haunted, weak, self-destructive people. In the past, though, he has tossed such creatures into the eddies of larger events. In A Hall of Mirrors (1967), a pot-smoking disk jockey in New Orleans stumbles into the fringes of a radical right-wing uprising. Dog Soldiers (1974) depicted California drug traffic as the Viet Nam War coming home to roost. A Flag for Sunrise (1981) showed some misfits sinking into a vortex of Central American revolution. The background stakes in Children of Light are, by comparison, inconsequential. A movie budgeted at a mere $7 million will go down the tubes if Lu Anne somehow manages to play her affliction out to its final scene and destroy herself. Whether Walker lives or dies hardly makes a dime's worth of difference to anyone, including him. Stone's saga of these two heedless souls is both enthralling and a little disappointing. The conclusion hardly matters. All the fun, most of it wonderfully nasty, is to be had in getting there.