The art of sound pictures (1930)

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YOUR STORY 95 In actual courtroom procedure, the young woman would have been rushed outside by attendants upon the first sign of disorder in the court. In the second place, even if she had reached the judge and started to tell her story, she would have been marched out of the room as soon as attendants could reach her. And finally, even if she succeeded in telling her whole story, which would be almost impossible, it would never be accepted as evidence without a single witness present to verify the confession and without regular legal procedure to admit the new witness to the witness stand. But if movie trials plodded on as slowly as do murder trials in real life, the motion picture business would go bankrupt. And writers, knowing this, are quick to realize the dramatic effectiveness of fakes which are as vivid as this. In The Trial of Mary Dugan, we find fake plotting aplenty. When the police come and find Mary Dugan sitting beside the body of the murdered man, Edgar Rice, they hear her moan over and over, “Oh, my poor Jimmy — my poor, poor Jimmy.” The audience is led to suppose that this Jimmy is a man of mystery, presumably Mary Dugan’s lover. Later, it turns out that Jimmy is her brother, whom she has been supporting with the money she got from her various lovers. But, in the course of the story, nothing emerges which would explain Mary’s repeating her brother’s name endlessly as she looked at the dead man. Jimmy was no source of trouble to her at that time, nor was anything adduced throughout the trial which would indicate that Rice’s death might injure Jimmy. His name was merely lugged in to mystify the audience. The realities of the situation were ignored.