In George Roy Hill's Toys in the Attic, a shiftless small businessman (Dean Martin) returning to New Orleans with his young bride (Yvette Mimieux), becomes involved in a real estate swindle that results in the exposure of hidden racial ancestry and secret incestuous desires. The film positions the South as a distorted site where southern whiteness has become Gothicized by the intrusion of insanity, incest, and irrationality into the family dynamics of the old southern elite. Invoking an image of a mythic Old South, the film simultaneously summons an image of the South as a site of degradation, which manifests in tropes and motifs that engage with the Southern Gothic through the lens of racism, the grotesque, and the resonances of slavery and Civil War. As Langman and Ebner have written, Toys in the Attic contains many Southern Gothic elements such as “incest, infidelity and lust’” which, like A Streetcar Named Desire, Suddenly, Last Summer, and Baby Doll, unfold within a world of “decadence and dark shadows” (2001, 121). Screenwriter James Poe, who adapted Lillian Hellman's play for the screen after having successfully adapted other southern plays and novels including Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and William Faulkner's Sanctuary, included an optimistic ending and tropes such as rumpled sheets, a cheap hotel, clinging slips, and sleeveless undershirts, to ensure the film conformed to a “sweltering and sexy” view of the South that was popular in cinema at the time (Dick 1982, 122).