The other performers, enjoying disparate levels of celebrity in the early ’60s, tackle their respective lingual challenges in Walk on the Wild Side with varying degrees of proficiency. Euro-suave Laurence Harvey stumbles with his Lone Star drawl as Texan farmer Dove; lily-white Anne Baxter, with a jet-black fall and Spanish accent, utters a passable “Vaya con Dios” as the café owner Teresina. And mononymed French model/actress Capucine, as Hallie, the Doll House’s main attraction, wearily speaks in the idioms of the melancholic Continental sophisticate inexplicably turned doxy: “I’m a sculptress. Or rather, I used to be before I fell down the well.”

As sticky, damp, and feverish as its Big Easy setting, the plot of Walk on the Wild Side is set in motion by the woman Dove masochistically pursues—Hallie—and those he rejects. Hitchhiking from his home of Arroyo, Texas, where he spent an unforgettable summer with the tragic beauty three years earlier, to New Orleans, where he hopes to ask Hallie to marry him (her letters didn’t specify her new profession), Dove meets Kitty, a teenage runaway from an orphanage in Kentucky. The minor (Fonda was twenty-three during shooting) puts the moves on the one-woman man, who rebuffs her—as Dove will later turn down big-hearted martyr Teresina’s offer: “I love enough for two.”