Movies, just like a successful business, often depend on the location, location, location.

Films have long depended on lush landscapes and exotic locales, both real and imagined, as a device for telling stories. Whether it's Tunisia filling in for an alien landscape in Star Wars or the Korean War field hospital built in a state park on the California coast for M*A*S*H , location, or the illusion of location, has always served an important part in the filmmaking process.

Every once in a while, a location becomes an integral part of the story and structure of a movie. In those instances, place becomes as important as persona, and a physical location becomes as compelling as any star.

Here are five examples:

MONUMENT VALLEY: Straddling the Utah-Arizona border, this expanse of high desert, big sky and distinctive rock formations became the geological muse for many of director John Ford's Westerns. Any time you see John Wayne galloping across a barren landscape, chances are he's high-tailing it across this valley. Its scope and scale are best captured in the 1956 epic The Searchers .

DEVILS TOWER: Officially, Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming is a monolithic igneous intrusion. Whatever. Film fans know it's where UFOs go to party. What's astonishing about Devils Tower is not that Steven Spielberg chose to immortalize it in Close Encounters of the Third Kind , but rather that it took the film industry so long to discover and capture this unique site. I, for one, will never look at a plate of mashed potatoes in the same way again.

PETRA, JORDAN: Speaking of Mr. Spielberg, the mysterious marble palace that his hero gallops up to at the conclusion of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is no matte painting nor carefully constructed model; it's a building known as the Treasury, part of the ancient city of Petra in Jordan. Like many of the buildings in the Middle Eastern city, the Treasury is carved out of the side of a mountain. It's an astonishing piece or architecture that was recently named one of the New Seven Wonders of the World.

THE PSYCHO HOUSE: Sure, the house on the hill that looms over the blood-soaked action in Psycho was never an actual dwelling, but that doesn't make it any less iconic. Built specifically for the film, the menacing Victorian has become the template for scary structures and still survives on the Universal studios back lot. Rumor has it you can still see Norman's mother rocking away in an upstairs window.

THE CHATTOOGA RIVER: This lovely, long stretch of wild river in north Georgia became one of the more menacing locales in film history when director John Boorman cast it as the backwoods battlefield that a quartet of suburbanites must navigate in Deliverance . I'm pretty sure nary a single tourist manages to make it through the scenic splendor without whistling a little bit of Dueling Banjos .