Review of The Whole Wide World (1996) by Jean-Francois V — 10 Jul 2008

Set in the early 1930s, "The Whole Wide World" is a biopic about the relationship between Novalyne Price and pulp fiction writer Robert E. Howard, mostly famous for creating the character of Conan the Cimmerian. Based on the autobiographical account published by Price decades after the events under the title "One Who Walked Alone", and subject to the usual Hollywood distortions (as acknowledged in the end titles themselves), it may not be entirely factual, and probably gives too negative an image of Howard. Indeed, having read his latest biography in the two days after viewing the film, I found Howard to be a much more humourous, self-confident, intellectual and stable man than the film suggests (making him look rather like an often unpleasant, borderline psychopathic half moron), and I believe that Price herself was less innocent than she seems to admit.

Factual errors in the movie include a false depiction of the meeting between Howard and H. P. Lovecraft (the latter did not phone Howard?s mum, it was Howard who wrote to him, via their publisher, years before he met Price) ; and the myth of the "last letter" found on the typewriter, when in fact it was an extract from a poem found in Howard?s wallet that may not have had anything to do with his death.

That said, "The Whole Wide World" is much more faithful to the facts than most Hollywood movies : greater liberties were taken by the authors of "Finding Neverland" or "Good Night and Good Luck", for instance. And whatever the distortions, it succeeds entirely as a melodramatic romance movie, and is in the same league, in my opinion, as "Shadowlands." Even though I knew how it would end ? I have known of Howard?s death ever since high school ? it made me cry as the end titles rolled on. I felt sad for the waste, sad maybe that Howard could not meet a woman that could truly share his inner life, but only one who was close enough to him to make him mistake her for his soul mate, and believe that he would never find anything better to fill the void in his heart.

I loved the film enough to read the biography by Mark Finn over the next two days, and the latter book made me order two volumes of Howard?s fiction and the standard biography of Lovecraft by S. T. Joshi.