On the positive side, it may be that Farrell's face is too particularly expressive for a generic knight in such overblown productions. His Alexander was embarrassing but no more so than Clark Gable's performance as Parnell. Farrell isn't dismissible, he's simply less adaptable than we might have expected. He's resourceful enough, however, that miscasting per se isn't the worst thing that can happen to him. In A Home at the End of the World (2004), he actually benefited from being miscast. His role as a gayboy's dream of a bisexual best friend — a pure-hearted stud who never says no and is never put out by his lovers' complexes and tantrums — was a pink smoke ring. Farrell obviously had to hold back to play that utterly innocent, blocked manchild, but the obviousness made him amusing to watch. The confusions that played on his face were so clearly crafted that I was drawn to the working actor even though I rejected the character he was playing. Something similar is going on in Ask the Dust, except that I don't reject the character.

John Fante worked in the tradition of the expostulating modern bard, which includes Whitman, Henry Miller, and Charles Bukowski (who wrote the 1979 introduction to the copy I read). Consequently, the book centers more securely than the movie on Arturo's emergence as a published novelist. The love story feels secondary and is at times somewhat tiresome because Arturo and Camilla, who is masochistically in love with Arturo's rival, never seem as movie-ishly right-and-wrong for each other as Farrell and Hayek do.

This is the way in which the old-movie romantic Robert Towne brings so much to the project. As his script for Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974) still shows, Towne does haunted nostalgia better than anybody. Ask the Dust is another Los Angeles story about doomed lovers in the '30s, and Towne has given the book's dialogue a brilliant polish for the screen (including an exchange between Arturo and Camilla about the color of his eyes that is the best on the subject I can remember, and no less romantic for being bitter). Towne's love of the era and his tough-guy jocularity give everything a dark shine, including the quietly anguished episodes involving Hellfrick (Donald Sutherland), a drunk who cadges nickels off Arturo, and the garrulously anguished ones involving Vera Rivken (Idina Menzel), a mad literary groupie who stalks him.

The old-Hollywood combination of "sultry" and "funny" could make otherwise unremarkable stories like To Have and Have Not (1944) and Gilda (1946) teasingly memorable. You know that the villains will be vanquished and the lovers will end up together, but the oddly heterogeneous tone gives the story suspense on a different level: you never know how any scene will play. The story may be a political melodrama, but the characters interact with the bantering suggestiveness of a burlesque show. The pretense that the moviemakers are primarily interested in telling the story is perhaps hypocritical, but you can't take it seriously enough to resent it.