Fool for Love (film)  Fool for Love is a 1985 American drama film directed by Robert Altman. The film stars Sam Shepard, who also wrote both the original play and the adaptation's screenplay, alongside Kim Basinger, Harry Dean Stanton, Randy Quaid and Martha Crawford. It was entered into the 1986 Cannes Film Festival. It was filmed in Eldorado and Las Vegas, New Mexico. May is hiding out at an old motel in the Southwest. She is staying at the motel when an old flame and childhood friend, Eddie, shows up. Eddie confronts May and seems to try to convince her in argumentative terms that their fates are somehow linked and that they should stay together. May vehemently refuses him. She says that she has absolutely no interest in living with Eddie under any circumstances, that she has a job and started a new life and knows that if she goes back to Eddie their relationship will repeat the same destructive cycle it has followed before. As May's current love interest, Martin, shows up for a date, Eddie begins to thicken the narrative somewhat about his relationship with May as having a dark secret hidden within. Throughout the film the character of the Old Man—apparently the father of both lovers—sits to the side and talks to May and Eddie and offers commentary on each character and about himself. It is revealed that the Old Man had led a double life, abandoning each family in the same town for different periods during each child's life. Without knowledge of their father's philandering, May and Eddie became lovers in their high school years and when their parents finally figured out what had occurred, Eddie's mother shot herself. May is afraid that Eddie has begun to emulate his father's feckless womanizing; taking to drinking and secretly seeing a woman May refers to as the Countess. The Countess returns twice to the old motel where May is staying in a black Mercedes and opens fire with a revolver apparently trying to shoot Eddie for his misconduct and mistreatment of her in their affair. In the meanwhile, the Old Man has begun to drift off in denial that Eddie's mother had been driven to suicide, and May's erstwhile date, Martin, is left standing bewildered to observe it all. When the Countess next returns for her revenge against Eddie, a stray shot from her revolver sets off an explosion which ignites the entire old motel into a blaze of fire. The "fools" in the play are the battling lovers, May and Eddie, at the run-down Mojave Desert motel which is left ablaze burning to ashes in a panorama before their eyes as the film ends.