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DRAMATURGY 49
Chase direction. A very important factor in a chase sequence is the direction which the chase takes. This is actually within the province of the director and the film editor. But the screen-play writer should have some knowledge of the techniques involved so that the script material he supplies will be as usable as possible, and so that rewrites may be avoided. This subject will be dealt with more fully in other sections, so it will suffice to say here that the direction the action takes on the screen— from left to right or from right to left— must be consistent throughout so that the audience is able to accompany the hunter and the hunted as they approach each other.
Anything can liappen. The chase has a peculiar virtue in that, in it, anything can happen. Where the other elements of a picture must hew to the line of normality, the elements of the chase can be atypical. They can be comic, humanly realistic, outlandishly burlesqued, even maudlinly sentimental. Chaplin's comedies— even the later ones— drool with bathos of the worst sort. Yet, because much of the bathos is introduced in a fast-action chase, the frenetic, supercharged effects engendered by the chase tend to offset the false sentiment, so that it loses some of its objectionableness.
So, in the chase, the writer has an opportunity to go hog-wild, as it were, with his creative imagination. Because anything can happen in a seemingly uncontrolled chase, even the most fantastic situations and developments can be resorted to. Hitchcock and Rene Clair have both fully realized this virtue of the chase in many of their pictures.
In the old days almost every comedy company hired what it termed a "wild man," someone who knew nothing about picture making but who was capable of suggesting the most outlandish, the most impossible things to be done. The results were chases that bordered on the maniacal— but they were funny.
Picturesque chases. To be most effective, chases should take place in picturesque locales, places that are not necessarily pretty but, rather, out of the ordinary. They can occur on murky docks, through towering theater fly galleries, across impassable canyons, through underground water mains (He Walks by Night and The Third