Marcus extracted her - and they traveled together on the two-day hike on-foot back to her base.During their trip, he defended her from two potential rapists/thieves, and they bonded further when she asked for some "body heat" and mentioned that he had a "strong heart" within his chest.The unnerved Letty imagined in her mind, via an inserted cutaway, an image of a white stallion (the "ghost horse") galloping up into the clouds - a frequent subjective vision in the film.The actress Bette Davis (in her mid-career at the age of 40) was miscast in the film as the young, beautiful and dissatisfied sexpot, playing one of the baddest, no-good, trashiest, and most warped of allfemme fatalesas she schemed and murdered to escape her oppressive small-town roots and get out of her stultifying marriage.It was a tremendous international (world-wide) box-office success, and launched the US career of its star Mel Gibson.