A hundred million movie-goers must be right... (1938)

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form and substance as all the elements of deception and its intensifications combined. In fact, running gags and comedy characters alone provide enough variations to reduce to a minimum any chances of a sameness in the finished product. Take the comedy characters used frequently to relieve tension when sympathy and suspense reach the sob and scream pitch : The fuss-budgets, dithery, hurried, harried, meek, servile and docile souls thankful for small favors, brokenhearted over trivia; perpetually alarmed, perpetually surprised. The Casper Milquetoastes, nervous wrecks, confirmed pill-eaters suffering from illusionary ills; hen-pecked husbands, worms forever turning. Prim, proper, prudish, talkative, nosey, spiteful, gossipy, awed and suspicious types. Critical condemning, petty, wheedling, whiny characters. Sour-pusses, cynics, hard-hearted softies; grouches, soreheads, and lazy good-for-nothing characters. Uppity dames, flibberty-jibbets, faddists and gals who soar with their astral bodies; expostulating stuffed shirts, arms-akimbo butlers, philosophical alter egos, stupid Man-Fridays, hotel clerks superior to their guests, bluffs, fakes and four-flushers. Dumb tough-mugs, lunkhead trigger-men, vacantfaced private hawkshaws, absent-minded bodyguards, wits, nitwits, simps, saps, boobs and stumble-bums. When the universal pursuits, vengence or vindication, regeneration or redemption, possession or dispossession, chase or capture, reform or expose, rescue or escape, loyalty or love, ambition or success, are given a laugh treatment as variable as the deceptions and intensifications inverted, exaggerated and relieved, music and color accentuating the natural charm of a thousand and one combinations of time, place and personality, there is little chance of romance and crime ever becoming repetitious. However, despite the variations possible and the fact that year after year the movies have become increasingly enjoyable, there is no escaping the fact that movie production is in a monotone of romance and crime, those ingredients as consistently featured as meat and vegetables on the American menu. 17