A practical manual of screen playwriting : for theater and television films (1952)

DRAMATURGY 45 someone else intervenes to frustrate his intentions. By adding a definite limit to the time in which the intention is to be executed, the suspense can be heightened and the interest strengthened and sustained. Even without setting a time limit, suspense can result. The chase The fight-against-time device is usually part of another dramatic device, one that has been popularized by, and is best suited to, the motion picture. It is the chase. Movement in the extreme. The chase was used in the first feature motion picture ever produced— The Great Train Robbery. It has been an effective stock in trade ever since. Griffith used it effectively in the ice floe scene of Way Down East, in the ride of the hooded men in Birth of a Nation, and in the chase to save a man doomed to the gallows in Intolerance, which he also used in Danton's ride to the guillotine in Tale of Two Cities. The chase, of all filmic devices, is basic motion-picture material. By its very nature, because it presents movement in the extreme, it furnishes motion to every picture in which it plays a part. There was a time, in the early days of picture making, when the chase was imperative, because the producers were fully cognizant of its surefire propensities. Universal application. Even today the chase is still being used in almost every picture. Westerns, especially, dote on it. Even documentaries, which supposedly eschew the hackneyed feature-film tricks to create cinematic devices of their own, often rely on the chase. O'Flaherty's Louisiana Story used it in a number of variations in the scenes between the boy, the alligator, and the tame coon. And De Sica's magnificent Bicycle Thief was a chase from beginning to end, with Maggiorani and his son chasing the bicycle thief through the murky streets of Rome. Western chases. The broad-vista setting of a mountain range as a backdrop lends itself admirably to a chase of any sort, especially