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OK, here's another annoying trivia question. My screenwriter friends are
always coming up with these ideas, and they want to know where these ideas
might have been done before. They're the kind of questions you just can't
answer in a reference book. So I figure I might as well annoy y'all with
them. Sometimes you just have to ask a group of people to throw out titles.
It's more fun in person, but anyway... (Remember the twins question?)
 
So we want a list of films in which the protagonist, or at least a major
character, at the end of the film, just kind of walks out the door and,
without a word to anyone, goes away and doesn't come back. I can't think of
a more articulate way to put this. "Bolting protagonists" sounds awful.
 
So far we only have two titles that really fit. "Five Easy Pieces" and
"Positive ID" (an independent film from Texas from a few years back).
 
I also have a list of titles that don't quite fit but that maybe have some
tangential relation (or that I'm not sure about):
 
The Passenger (note the Jack Nicholson repeat -- kind of interesting)
A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (Peter Medak)
Messidor (Alain Tanner)
Fearless (Peter Weir)
Ordinary People
Naked (Mike Leigh)
None But the Lonely Heart (Clifford Odets - Cary Grant)
Bagdad Cafe
Thelma and Louise
The Sheltering Sky
Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch)
 
Perhaps people could refresh my memory as to whether any characters in these
films actually do anything like what I've described. It also strikes me that
an action like this would be typical of films by Godard, Antonioni, Wenders,
Altman, Tanner, Bresson, Akerman, etc.
 
Any ideas?
 
Thanks in advance,
 
Joshua Hirsch
UCLA
 
P.S. Just thought of Badlands.