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DRAMATURGY 47
Ripper is chasing the young girl, or his next victim, while, at the same time, the Ripper is being chased by the Scotland Yard man who is in love with the young girl.
The Carol Reed picture, Odd Man Out, was a sustained chase from beginning to end, suspenseful to the very moment when the chase ended with Mason and his girl framed in the pitiless glare of the police-car headlights.
Build your chase. To be effective, the chase requires top-notch film editing, to which the screen-play writer can contribute by writing in suitable shots and shot descriptions.
The chase calls for, in the first place, careful attention to "building." It must be introduced after the characters in the chase are fully identified, and after their place in the scheme of the story is well established. There can be variations of this dictum, of course. The hunter, for example, need never be identified until the very end of the picture. Then, again, the identity of the hunted need never be established until the picture's closing shots, as was done in The Mask of Dimitrios.
But by and large, if the chase is to be integrated, its characters and their relationships must be fairly well established. That done, the exposition of the plot can then be developed slowly at first, but gradually mounting in speed by shortening the length of the scenes until the actual chase begins.
Dialogue impedes chases. The chase itself then, should serve as the high spot of the build-up. It should be written briskly. The dependence here should be not so much on dialogue as on action. The audience should be permitted to see the story rather than to hear it being told in dialogue form. In Western chases, minutes often elapse before a word of dialogue is heard, and then the dialogue is usually staccato, on the order of a laconic, "He went thataway!" the cliche which has come to typify most Western chases.
For dialogue tends to slow up the action necessary to the chase. But where the action has been breathlessly fast and where a halt is called for, dialogue— and only that of the terse, staccato typecan be introduced, in much the same manner as a jockey checks the speed of his horse in order to reserve enough strength for a burst of speed in the home stretch.