The art of sound pictures (1930)

YOUR STORY 91 The second variety of suspense is skillfully handled in a unique pattern in the talkie, Thru Different Eyes. As the picture opens, newsboys are frantically shoving extras, announcing a murder, into the eager hands of passers-by. The scene then shifts to a press room, in which reporters are telephoning frenzied accounts of the trial of the murderer to their newspapers. In this way, the initial situation is revealed to the audience, which learns that a man is now on trial for the murder of his best friend. The scene later shifts to the courtroom where the trial is taking place. Here, the author devises an ingenious method of holding the suspense and interest of the audience, and instead of developing the initial situation to one climax and a denouement, he plots his story in such a way that there are three major climaxes, with one final denouement. This is how he does it; The audience is shown three successive pictures of the same murder, as three different people insist it to have taken place. The first picture shows the succession of events leading to the murder, as they are conceived by the attorney for the defense, who tells this story to the jury. The second shows the same characters in the same initial situation, but with a different series of events causing the murder, as the prosecuting attorney believes them to have taken place and so tells the jury. The scene then shifts back to the courtroom, where the judge charges the jury and later hears its verdict of “Guilty.” Now, a woman who has been attending the trial rushes up to the judge, says that the defendant is not guilty, and hysterically tells her own story, which proves her to be the former mistress, and now the murderer, of the de