Summary
When Ellie tries to thank Peter for his help, he tells her that he did it for his own sake because he didn’t like the sound of the man’s voice. “What did you do all day?” he asks her, and she tells him she spent most of the day trying to stay dry from the rain. When Ellie tries to buy a box of chocolates from a boy selling concessions on the bus, Peter prevents it and tells the boy to beat it. He then looks in Ellie’s purse and realizes that she’s spent nearly all of her $4 that she had before, and asks her, “How do you expect to get to New York at the rate you’re going?” Suddenly the bus reaches a bridge. It’s closed down because of the pouring rain and an officer informs the bus driver that they will not be able to cross over that evening. The officer then tells the passengers that they can sleep at a nearby camp. Peter calls back to Ellie, “Hey brat!” and informs her that they’re stopping at the camp for the night.
We see Ellie smoking a cigarette in the rain as Peter arranges for a room to sleep in for the night. She walks through the rain towards the room. Their accommodations are two twin beds next to each other in a small room. Ellie confronts Peter about the fact that he told people that they are husband and wife. He tells her that she should be grateful, and assures her that he is not interested in her in the slightest, dismissively assuring her, “You’re just a headline to me.” When he says this, Ellie realizes that he is a newspaperman. He tells her that he will help her get to King Westley if she agrees to tell him her story for the paper. “Well isn’t that just too cute,” she says, and removes her coat, threatening to go back out in the storm. Peter promises to follow her and turn her in to her father if she goes out alone or misbehaves in any way. He asks her which bed she prefers, closes the blinds, and hangs up a blanket on a line between their beds. Ellie remains skeptical of the sleeping arrangements, but he throws her “a pair of [his] best pajamas,” just to show her that “[his] heart is in the right place.”
He begins to undress for bed, theatrically demonstrating the order with which he removes his clothes. Ellie does not move for awhile, but when he goes to take off his pants, she runs to the other side to her bed. Dejected, she sits down on the bed, while Peter wears a robe and smokes a cigarette on his side of the room. He assures her that “the walls of Jericho will protect you from the big bad wolf.” He then begins singing “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf,” but Ellie interrupts him to ask if he will turn off the light. He agrees and she removes her clothes in the dark, as Peter smokes a cigarette in bed. She throws her clothes over the line and he watches, telling her that she should “take those things off the walls of Jericho.” Embarrassed, she pulls the clothes back to her side and gets into bed. As she gets in to her bed, Ellie asks Peter what his name is. “Who, me?" he says. "I’m the whippoorwill that cries in the night. I'm the soft morning breeze that caresses your lovely face.” She eventually gets him to tell her his real name, and upon hearing it, tells him she doesn’t like it. “Don’t let it bother me, you’re giving it back to me in the morning.”
We see Mr. Andrews in a small plane. He receives word that there has been no sign of his daughter, before angrily ordering the pilot to speed up the flight. The scene shifts back to the camp where Ellie and Peter are staying. We can hear Mr. Andrews’ plane buzz overhead as Ellie wakes up. For a moment she is disoriented, before calling out to Peter. Just then, he comes back in from outside and throws her a toothbrush. She looks up and notices that he had her dress pressed and it’s hanging beside her bed. Ellie is touched by Peter’s kindness and smiles at him, but he scolds her for not being out of bed yet, counting to 10 and threatening to drag her out himself. She jumps out of bed hastily and Peter tells her that the showers are outside. When he flirts with her a little bit, she runs outside to find the showers, walking past a number of working-class people to get there.
When she gets to the showers, there seems to be a long line to use one, and she marches right up to a stall and accidentally opens it. The woman in the shower screams and Ellie quickly closes the door. The women in line laugh heartily at Ellie’s misstep, and a young girl sticks her tongue out at her. She waits in line like the rest of the women. Later, when Ellie emerges from the shower, she runs into Shapeley who apologizes for hitting on her. She returns to the room and gets dressed. Once she’s dressed, Peter serves her eggs, a doughnut, and some coffee for breakfast. They sit down to eat together and Peter is surprised by how “disgustingly cheerful” Ellie is. “It must be the spring!” she says, before asking him whether he thinks her situation—running away from her father—is silly. She then tells Peter that she doesn’t think she’s a spoiled brat, even if everybody else does, because she’s never been able to make her own decisions or chart her own course in life. “This is the first time I’ve ever been alone with a man!” she tells Peter, listing all of the supervision she’s had for her entire life. She then tells him a story about when she went shopping alone one time and had to jump into a random car to escape her father's detectives—the car turned out to be King Westley's, and that's how they met. Peter notices that Ellie is dunking her doughnut in coffee and gives her some advice about how to dunk more efficiently. When he teases her for having all the money in the world, she replies that she’d rather be “a plumber’s daughter.”
The scene shifts outside and we see two detectives checking out each of the cabins at the camp. The owner of the cabins yells at them, insisting that they aren’t entitled to snoop, but they tell him they’re detectives. Inside their cabin, Peter and Ellie hear the detectives, and Peter rushes to the window. Ellie doesn’t have any time to hide, so Peter messes up her hair and unbuttons her shirt a bit, affecting an accent and yelling as the detectives knock on the door. After a moment of confusion, Ellie gets the hint and begins brushing her hair in front of her eyes and affecting a Southern accent. As the detectives enter, Peter and Ellie pretend to be simple Southern folk to elude the detectives. One of the detectives approaches Ellie and asks for her name, but Peter pushes him away and says, “That’s my wife you’re talkin’ to!” Peter makes a scene about the detectives barging in and Ellie plays the role of his wife, telling him to calm down. They launch into a furious improvised fight, in character. “Once a plumber’s daughter, always a plumber’s daughter!” he yells, and Ellie pretends to sob. The detectives tell Peter they’re looking for Ellie Andrews, but he sarcastically snarls, “It’s too bad you’re looking for a plumber’s daughter!” as Ellie sobs in her chair. The detectives leave.
Shutting the door, Peter and Ellie laugh hysterically. Peter compliments Ellie’s performance and says, “You have a brain!” He buttons up her shirt and jokes that they could start a theater company together. She giggles when suddenly there is a knock on the door. Peter and Ellie put on their fighting couple characters again, but it’s only a man telling them that the bus is leaving in 5 minutes. They rush to get packed up.
Analysis
Peter must teach Ellie how to live like a normal person if she is going to make it to New York. When she tries to buy a chocolate on the train, he prevents her from doing so, urging her that she has to learn how to live on a budget if she wants to make it. She’s already spent more than half of her $4 and they aren’t even out of Florida yet. When they arrive at the camp, Peter gets a room for the both of them, pretending they are a married couple in order to dispel any suspicions about them. While Ellie would prefer her own room, Peter assures her that he can keep her undercover in her escape if she stays with him in the small room and they remain discreet. While she is hesitant at first to be Peter’s pupil, Ellie eventually gets taken in by the smooth-talking newspaperman’s charms and begins to enjoy being on the road with him.
Within a day of knowing each other, Ellie and Peter find themselves sharing a bedroom. At first, Ellie is completely opposed to the arrangement, and especially offended by Peter’s insinuation to the man who rents the room, that they are traveling as husband and wife. When he threatens to turn her in to her father unless she cooperates with a news story he is writing, and when she remembers she has no money to pay for a separate room, Ellie finds that she must share a room with a stranger. Peter hangs a curtain, which he cheekily calls the “walls of Jericho,” and begins to get undressed in front of her in a charged game of chicken. When he goes to remove his pants, Ellie rushes to the other side of the curtain and begins getting undressed herself. The scene is charged with the suggestion of the sexual tension between them and the particular scandalousness of them sharing a room as though they are husband and wife, when in reality they barely know one another. The sexual charge is only implied, however, and Peter assures her that he has no intention of violating her, even though he knows she perceives him as “the Big Bad Wolf.” He teases her about her seeming prudishness and her assumption that he is a sexual threat by simply carrying out his nightly routine as though she weren’t there. His brisk straightforwardness and lack of preciousness only heightens the tension between them as Ellie runs for safety on her side of the curtain.
The shots of Ellie undressing in the dark and Peter lying back in bed are not overtly sexual, but they are undeniably erotic and intimate. While the beginning of the scene in the shared bedroom is shot in a more stage-like way—with all the lights on, shot as if from an audience—when the two travelers go to their respective sides of the makeshift curtain, the camera zooms in on each of them, and we can see their expressions and emotions more nakedly, just as they themselves are getting more physically naked. With this closer look, the viewer is invited along Ellie and Peter’s respective psychological journeys. Indeed the process of getting ready for bed and getting undressed is already a vulnerable ritual, and the vulnerability they each feel is highlighted by the closeness of the camera. We see Peter lie back in bed with a cigarette, his face partially obscured by shadow and a curiously contented expression on his face. We then see Ellie removing her clothes slowly on the other side, finally letting down her guard in half-privacy. Each of them knows that the other is getting into bed, that each is in their pajamas, but neither can see the other. This creates an erotic relationship, in which each of them is in a state of imagining the other undressing, imagining the other getting into bed, imagining the other’s body. With erotic curiosity and imaginings comes the first moment where Ellie feels any kind of real curiosity about Peter, and she asks him what his name is and who he is, just as she settles into bed. It has literally not even occurred to her to ask about his identity until she finds herself in a bed next to him.
In this section, Ellie talks about how overprotected she has been as a member of the upper class. Over breakfast, she confides that her life has been dominated by governesses and bodyguards, and she has barely had a moment to herself for her entire life. Indeed, she only met her current husband King Westley because she accidentally climbed into his car with him on an unchaperoned shopping trip. While it appears that Ellie’s life has been charmed, she contends that there are more difficulties to being a wealthy heiress than one might expect. The lack of privacy is a real pain, and she can hardly make any independent decisions without her father watching her like a hawk. Peter jokingly calls her a brat, but she insists that brats are able to make decisions for themselves, while she has been beholden to others for her entire life. Peter provides a break from this highly supervised lifestyle, and while he exerts his own kind of control over her actions, he also gives her plenty of room to be her own person on her own terms.
Ellie and Peter’s intimacy grows as Ellie explains herself to him and they begin to get more comfortable together. Their shared mission to elude the authorities brings them ever closer. When her father’s detectives come knocking on their cabin door, Ellie and Peter must think fast in order to undermine them. Rather than hide Ellie somewhere in the cabin, they affect alternate identities, pretending to be a combative Southern couple, screaming and fighting in front of the detectives. Ellie and Peter prove to be expert performers and chameleons, and each inhabits their over-the-top role with admirable commitment. After the detectives leave, the two companions burst into laughter, and Peter is impressed with Ellie’s acting abilities. To him, it proves that she has a brain and she isn’t just a priggish society girl with no imagination. Ellie is delighted by her ability to transform as well, and she giggles along with Peter as he jokes that they should start an acting troupe. What was once a cold association between the two of them has become playful, warm, and conspiratorial. They are now like outlaws on the run, working together to sneak their way to New York and freedom.
