FILM CHRONICLE
397
selves that the Moment of Love will be there in the morning; just
enjoy 'it while it's to be had. But the majority of films, of course, seek
happy endings; and what they do is skilfully cut, just end the film before
the Moment of Love can fade.
But they also resort to one other device, to sustain love's world a
little longer-that is: to people this world, not simply with the two
lovers, but with some semblance of a "company." The milk man in
The Clock, the
housekeeper and the blind musician in
The Enchanted
Cottage-these
are conspirators, as it were. But
The Enchanted Cottage
outdoes itself: it even provides the semblance of an already existent com–
pany into which the two can be duly initiated. The enchanted cottage
has always been rented exclusively to honey-mooners; the names of former
couples are scratched on a certain window pane. Our two lovers are
worried, since at the very start their marriage was a marriage of con–
venience, lest "They" will not accept them into their company. (They of
course do.)
In
The Clock
the lovers even, pathetically, invoke God as a con–
spirator. The morning the boy must leave, the girl says to him (in effect):
"You will
~orne
back. I know it. Because whoever is doing the arranging
for us, has arranged things very nicely so far." In
None But The Lonely
Heart,
as remarked, the ex-husband is really seen as the One who does
the arranging, who says yes or no. The lovers appeal to him, too. But
his heart is not touched.
"If
it's love you want," he tells the two, "go
to the movies; I don't believe in it." Yes, hearts must be touched, if the
magic is to hold. "The places of the world are empty," Ike declares,
"and the human heart is everything." Here is, indeed, the final signifi–
cance of Tyler's ominously isolated Moment of Love: when the places
of the world are felt as empty, then the heart has to be everything, unto
itself.
BARBARA DEMING
