We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
JANUARY 1925
Picture s and Picture puer
57
picture-going public. Folks who pay anything up to half-a-crown to own a plush scat in a kinema for a couple of hours expect to get their money's worth of enjoyment.
And, though there are a few people who are happiest when most miserable, the majority prefer to be able to exclaim, as the lights go up after the final fade-out, " There, 1 knew it would all come right in the end!"
So the villain must be got out of the way somehow and so effectively that there shall be no possibility of him turning up again to wreck the course of true love. It's nothing like so easy to get rid of a villain, however, as it is for a villain to dispose of his victims.
If he is the bad man of a serial, for instance, he always lives in a house simply overstocked with trapdoors, secret wells and underground passages ; while the hero has his home in an ordinary four-walled building positively void of any such useful contrivances !
The author sometimes plans, therefore, for the hero to meet the rascal on the edge of a forbidding cliff. The rough-and-tumble, which nearly always ensues in the movie world when the good man meets his arch-enemy, is so
nicely timed that it is always the plotter who goes over the edge.
lThat is such a favourite method of disposing of the villain
that every kinema-goer can recall numerous illustrative
examples. Sometimes it is a balcony instead of a cliff, as
in Glimpses of the Moon, when Maurice Costello, as the
villain of the piece, is hurled to his death.
There is ever the popular, time-honoured plan of bringing in a policeman just as the villain is about to clinch his final argument. If he is the sartorially perfect Society villain he will merely straighten his tie, give an extra twist to his elegantly waxed moustache — few Society villains are cleanshaven— shrug his immaculate shoulders and march, out under the escort of the Law with but a scornful glance at his erstwhile victims.
Should he be the shabby bad man of the under-world he will probably require handcuffs, and his fade-out from the film will be forcible than artistic. The adventurous villain of the great outdoors is generally treated with, scant ceremony and suffers short shrift at the
Above : The serial way. Pearl White is an adept at this.
Above : The comedy Lupino Lane knocks 'cm out in " A Friendly Husband."
hands of the sheriff's posse which effects his capture. A near-by tree often suffices to give him a picturesque exit from life in that film.
Other quite handy and familiar ways of getting rid of shadow sheet rogues are burning them in houses which they themselves have maliciously fired to trap the hero; poisoning them with 'heir own poison destined originally for the heroine; throwing them overboard; and blowing them up with their own pet bombs.
Walter Long, famous expert in screen villainy, could give budding film-play writers a carefully prepared list of tested methods for ousting villains.
" I have been shot, hurled from precipices, choked to death, drowned and poisoned," Long once told an interviewer. " In The Sheik, in the role of ' Omair,' I was killed in the desert. (Continued on page 74.)