Business Is Business

A peripatetic shack—half toy, half Trojan horse—trundles across a newborn Hollywood landscape, its clapboard flanks daubed in carnival yellow. Our huckster-hero, equal parts carnival barker and real-estate messiah, tows this wheeled mirage behind a coughing Tin Lizzie, parking it on virgin lots where the scent of orange groves still outwrestles the stench of ambition. He cadges earnest money from wide-eyed couples who dream of porches at dusk, then bolts before the sun can expose the cracks in his itinerant Eden. The film becomes a merry-go-round of dusty crossroads, each stop a new theater of persuasion: a hillside overlooking a future suburb, a beachfront lot where gulls heckle his sales pitch, a vacant downtown corner echoing with the clang of streetcars. Every handshake is a fleeting marriage between hope and hokum; every rev of the engine a divorce decree. When the final would-be buyer—a spinster clutching her life savings in a reticule shaped like a cathedral—chases the rolling shack down a rutted lane, the camera tilts skyward, as if asking heaven itself to endorse this gospel of mobile real estate. The cottage, now stripped of its last gullible tenant, recedes into a heat shimmer, a snail without its shell, a promise that keeps its own address secret.