Summary
When Peter has no luck getting any cars to stop, Ellie laughs at him and asks to try her hand at hitchhiking. Peter laughs at the thought that she would be able to get a car to stop, and she climbs off the fence and walks to the road. “I’ll stop a car and I won’t use my thumb,” she says. As a car passes, she lifts up her skirt to expose her leg. The driver of the passing car slams on the breaks, seduced. The scene shifts and we see Ellie and Peter riding in the back of a man’s car. Ellie asks if Peter’s going to give her some credit for her hitchhiking and they banter. The driver turns back and assumes they are recently married. He begins bellowing a made-up song about a couple hitchhiking on their honeymoon, to the bemusement of Ellie and Peter. When they arrive at a rest stop, the driver asks if they want anything to eat; Ellie does, but Peter declines the offer. The driver begins to sing again and goes into the station. When Ellie complains to Peter that she’s hungry, he offers her a carrot, but she doesn’t want it and starts to follow the driver into the station to get him to buy her something to eat. “You do and I’ll break your neck,” says Peter, pulling her back. Taken aback, Ellie stares at Peter, who tensely says that they ought to get out of the car and stretch their legs.
Out of the car, Peter apologizes to Ellie for his violent outburst. The driver comes out of the station, hops in his car, and drives away. Noticing that their ride is leaving without them, Peter runs after the car; his suitcase is still in the backseat. Some time passes, and eventually Ellie sees Peter driving the car towards her. Hopping in, she asks what happened and Peter tells Ellie that their driver was a “road thief,” and that he gave him a black eye, tied him to a tree, and stole his car. As they drive down the road, Ellie tends a small wound on Peter’s face. Noticing that the gas is running low, Peter tells Ellie to take out the contents of his coat to find what they can sell for some gas. She solemnly takes out the carrots and eats them.
The scene shifts to Mr. Andrews’ office, where he is scolding King Westley about his marriage to Ellie. King Westley assures Mr. Andrews that he and Ellie are in love and they will not be going through with an annulment. Mr. Andrews relents on his demand that they do, telling King that he will have to get used to their marriage, before confiding that he is worried about Ellie’s whereabouts. King Westley offers to help him locate Ellie in whatever way he can, and Andrews requests that King go and speak to the reporters and make a statement that Mr. Andrews no longer objects to his marriage to Ellie. We see a newspaper headline that reads, “Andrews Withdraws Objection.” A sub-headline reads, “‘Everything All Right. Come Home, Darling,’ Says Westley.”
Ellie is reading the headline when Peter comes out of a motel office and tells her that he managed to get the motel owner to give them a cabin for free. She is relieved, and it soon becomes clear that even though they are only 3 hours from their destination, Ellie has proposed that they stay at a motel for the night. Peter doesn’t see the point of making a stop, but apparently Ellie isn’t ready for the trip to be over. “I thought you were in such a hurry to get back,” Peter says, looking at her seriously. He directs her towards their cottage and she walks down to it, while he drives the car. Watching them, the motel owner’s wife scolds her husband for trusting the strangers. The owner, whose name is Zeke, assures his wife that he was a “nice young fellow” and they go back inside.
In their cabin, Ellie and Peter get ready for bed. Peter remarks upon the fact that it’s their last night together, and that tomorrow Ellie will be back with her husband. Gloomily, Ellie says, “You’ll have a great story, won’t you,” and Peter hangs up a line between their beds and makes another makeshift room divider. They each get undressed, and Ellie asks Peter if she’ll see him in New York. “Nope,” he says, matter-of-factly. “Why not?” she asks, to which he responds, “I don’t make it a policy to run around with married women.” When she tells him that he could spend time with her and her husband, he says he has no interest, before chiding her for wanting to see him again. “What do you want to see me again for? I’ve served my purpose!” Peter snaps. Ellie removes the rest of her clothes in silence and they each get into bed. After a moment of hesitation, Ellie asks, “Have you ever been in love, Peter?” He pretends not to know what she’s talking about, but she continues, “It seems to me you could make some girl wonderfully happy.” He admits that he’s thought about it, but that he doesn’t know where to meet “the right sort of girl.”
Peter laments about the limited selection of women in his life: “Where are you gonna find her? Somebody that’s real, somebody that’s alive! They don’t come that way anymore.” Ellie looks disappointed as Peter tells her that he’s even made plans around love, letting himself fall prey to his emotions. “I saw an island in the Pacific once, never been able to forget it. That’s where I’d like to take her,” Peter says of his imaginary lover. Peter continues describing the girl he wants to take: “She’d have to be the sort of girl who’d jump in the surf with me and love it as much as I did…You know, nights when you and the moon and the water all become one.” Ellie listens to Peter talk dreamily about nature. “If I could only find a girl who was hungry for those things!” Peter exclaims, and Ellie peeks around the curtain. Weeping, she goes to his bed and begs him, “Take me with you, Peter. Take me to your island. I want to do all those things.” He urges her to go back to her bed, but Ellie tells him that she loves him and that “nothing else matters.” She sobs and puts her head on Peter’s chest, telling him, “I couldn’t let you out of my life! I couldn’t live without you!” Peter puts his arms around her to comfort her, but abruptly says, “You’d better get back to your bed.”
Ellie apologizes, goes to her side of the room, and climbs into bed weeping. The scene shifts and we see Ellie asleep. On his side, Peter is still awake and smokes a cigarette. He sits up and calls to Ellie, asking if she meant what she said about going with him. Looking over the curtain divider, he notices that she’s asleep, looks at his watch, and gets dressed. He turns off the light and leaves the motel room without saying goodbye to Ellie. The scene shifts and we see Peter asking a man to fill up the car with gas, pawning his bag in lieu of money. When he gives the man his hat, the man agrees. We see Peter arriving in New York and bringing a typewriter into the backroom at a restaurant. A friendly Italian man talks to Peter, and Peter asks him to get him a drink for him to write with for the next half hour.
The scene shifts again and we see Peter arriving at his editor Joe Gordon’s office. While the secretary urges Peter not to go into the office, Peter barges in and tells Gordon that he wants $1000 for the story on Ellie. Gordon refuses, but Peter assures him that he needs the money to “tear down the walls of Jericho” and that he has the inside scoop that Ellie plans to get her marriage to King Westley annulled. Gordon tells Peter that if he could deliver that story, he would be happy to pay him $1000. “Who’s the guy she’s gonna marry?” Gordon asks. “I am,” says Peter, and Gordon starts to storm out of the office, sure that Peter is drunk. Peter tries to level with his editor, telling him that he met Ellie on the bus from Miami, they’re in love, and he needs the money pronto, so that he can propose. In the process, he mentions that Ellie is at a motel outside the city and that he has to get back to her as soon as possible. “What a story,” says Gordon, reconsidering and looking over the story Peter just typed up.
Meanwhile, back at the motel, the owner’s wife wakes up her husband Zeke and informs him that Peter is gone. “I told you ya couldn’t trust him!” she scolds. She rouses Zeke from bed and they go to the room where Ellie is staying.They bang on the door before storming in, where they wake up a bewildered Ellie. She is surprised to hear that Peter isn’t there anymore, and they tell her she has to leave immediately. Before she leaves, Ellie asks to use the phone, but Zeke’s wife refuses to let her use the phone and directs her towards the sheriff’s office down the road. Back in Gordon’s office, Gordon gives Peter the money and sends him on his way to propose to Ellie. After Peter leaves, Gordon makes some calls, preparing to break the scintillating story. Just as he’s making the calls, Gordon receives a call that Ellie just called her father from the town where she and Peter were staying and that she’s getting picked up. Gordon calls everyone back and rescinds Peter’s story, before ordering his secretary to get Peter arrested for lying to him, and slamming Peter’s story in the trash. When everyone is gone, Gordon pulls Peter’s story out of the trash and looks at it.
Analysis
Perhaps the most iconic scene in the film is the one in which Ellie shows Peter up at his own hitchhiking game. Peter talks a big game about how good at hitchhiking he is. In a display of cocky bravado and a desire to show the wealthy heiress just how “salt of the earth” he is, Peter gives Ellie a lengthy lecture on the proper choreography for the perfect hitchhike. This demonstration is both classed and gendered; Peter wants to show Ellie that he is a man of the people and he knows how to get by in the big bad world, but he also wants to show how the brotherhood of man takes care of its own. If the hitchhiker smirks in a particular way, Peter informs her, that communicates to passing drivers that he might have a “good story about the farmer’s daughter.” In other words, in Peter’s estimation, good hitchhiking involves having a salacious story to entertain one’s driver. When Peter fails at his own game, Ellie shows her agreement that hitchhiking has a lot to do with sex and desire, but instead of play the game like a man, she decides to exploit her feminine qualities to her advantage. Instead of holding out a thumb, she hitches up her skirt to reveal a shapely leg. Comically, the first car passes slams to a halt. Here Ellie demonstrates that a woman on the road can have as many tricks up her sleeve as a man.
In this section of the film, it becomes clear that Ellie’s feelings for Peter have deepened. This is first evidenced in the fact that she reads the headline about King Westley and makes no immediate move to go back to New York. Additionally, it is her idea to stay at a motel with Peter an extra night, even though he believes they would be able to get to New York that evening. While she resisted his companionship in the beginning of their acquaintance, Ellie comes to value Peter, and her love for him becomes undeniable. It turns out that Ellie was not only running from her father when she dove off the side of his yacht, but from the trappings of wealth itself, and from its restrictive hold on her actions. Having spent her whole life beholden to the wishes of others, Ellie finds in Peter the first man who makes her feel like an adventurer, and like her own person. He makes her feel both protected and independent at the same time, and this is an irresistible combination.
Just as they hung up a curtain divider at the last cabin they stayed in together, Ellie and Peter hang up another at the motel on the final night of their journey. They have each been changed by their travels together, but the curtain again serves the same purpose of allowing them to feel comfortable enough to speak their minds. From either side of the divider, Peter and Ellie can begin to express how they really feel about things. They never quite broach the topic of their mutual affection, but something about their invisibility on either side of the curtain allows them to be more genuinely curious and forthright with one another. Ellie asks Peter if he’s ever thought about love, and he admits to his own fantasies about falling in love, his desire to find a girl who’s truly “real” and “alive.” He describes how he would like to take his dream woman to a special island in the Pacific, and though he speaks about this imagined lover in the third person, one can easily imagine that he is speaking directly to Ellie. While they are prevented from being forthright with one another by Ellie’s marital status and their desire to remain discreet, on either side of the curtain they can begin to dream and fantasize—if not together, than for one another’s benefit.
A big part of Peter’s fantasy about love has to do with a meditative and beautiful relationship to nature and the outdoors. He describes his fantasy of taking his ideal lover to a beach and each of them enjoying the surf, before describing the scene conspiratorially, “You know, nights when you and the moon and the water all become one.” The scene Peter is describing is not simply about love shared between two people, but about two people who are in love merging with the landscape around them, becoming “one” with the water and the moon. In this moment, he is describing a hypothetical future to Ellie, but he is really describing the experience that they are already having, dropping out of society and making their way up the eastern seaboard, sleeping under the glow of the moon and braving the elements together. Peter’s romantic fantasy is a natural fantasy, one in which two people leave society—along with its social systems and divisions—and merge not only with each other, but with the earth itself. Indeed, he is describing the adventure they are on, and to which they are about to bid farewell.
The plot thickens a great deal when Peter leaves the motel in the middle of the night, struck by the inspiring thought that he will sell the story that Ellie is leaving King Westley for him to his editor for the money that he needs to propose to her. He sneaks out, drives to New York, types up the story, and delivers it to his editor. While Gordon doesn’t believe the ne’er-do-well newspaperman at first, he eventually decides that it’s a story worth publishing and pays Peter the money. While all that is happening, however, Zeke the motel owner and his wife wake Ellie and tell her that Peter abandoned her in the middle of the night. With no other options, Ellie makes a call to her father and decides to return to King Westley, not realizing that Peter is on his way back to her. Gordon, the harried and cynical newspaper editor, must call back all of his employees and rescind the story about Ellie marrying Peter, and replace it with the story that she is returning to her father and King Westley. The whole affair is a big, chaotic mess.
