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66 A PRACTICAL MANUAL OF SCREEN PLAYWRITING
a comedy. The exceedingly funny humor was introduced in a situation in which the citizens of an entire Italian village quaked in their boots because a drunken German soldier might awaken from his stupor and remember that the night before he had sullied his Nazi racial beliefs by dancing with an un-Nordic, American Negro soldier.
Remember the situation in Foreign Correspondent when Joel McCrea was chased over the roof tops by the Nazis? As he scurried past a hotel sign, he accidently broke off the tubing that formed the last two letters of the word "hotel," thus making the sign read "hot," an ironic comment on his precarious situation.
The dearth of real humor in our motion pictures may be accounted for by the fact that we are afraid that people will resent being made to laugh at themselves. They know that they do not drip flip cracks with every tenth word, so they disassociate themselves completely from the reel characters who do. They may laugh, yes, but it is the sort of laughter that is forgotten, like last night's off-color story.
But people can laugh at themselves. That has been proved by the success of Shaw's plays, by Ring Lardner's bitter but comic gibes at the genus homo americanus, by Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operettas, by such pictures as It Happened One Night, The Awful Truth, The Great McGinty, The Baker's Daughter, by all the Chaplin comedies, and even by many of the Marx Brothers pictures and the early W. C. Field mordaunt comedy satires.
Yes, there is a time for comedy and it is right now. But it must be the comedie humaine, of the real people, and not the stultifying wisecracks of the flicker folk of the reels.
The flash back
Filmic realism is often killed with still another popular device— the flash back. Why it should be necessary to go back in time to pick up incidents that occurred previous to the beginning of the picture, is a mystery. When used legitimately, the flash back can be an effective device, but when it is resorted to in pictures that could do much better without it, the flash back has serious drawbacks.