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68 A PRACTICAL MANUAL OF SCREEN PLAYWRITING
return occasionally to the old housekeeper, as she retailed the story of Wuthering Heights to the traveler who had wandered into the forbidding house. Then it was necessary to return to the succeeding episodes of the story she was telling, until it became necessary to return to her again, to re-establish her identity, and go on from there again to the story proper.
What happened, as far as the audience's view of the housekeepernarrator was concerned— and she was more than a minor character in the story— was to see her first as an old woman, then as a young woman, then again as an older woman, and again as an old woman (as the narrator), and then again as an aging woman. This may have been a remarkable tour de force by the make-up department, but it added nothing but confusion to the audience's attempt to understand the housekeeper's role in the story. She was presented in fits and starts, first young, then old, instead of by means of a slow character build-up. As a result, she never emerged as a distinct character although Heathcliff and the others did, despite the shattering flash-back technique. They came through, but what could have been a perfect picture without the flash back was just a rather good picture. Consider the picture Sunset Boulevard, made some time after Wuthering Heights. Now Sunset Boulevard is a great picture— a modern classic. But how much better it could have been had its writers not succumbed to the insidious attraction of the flash back. The picture opened with shots of a squad car speeding to the scene of a crime. Then came shots of a man's body floating in a Hollywood swimming pool. Then, as if from nowhere, came a man's voice— William Holden's— telling the story of what had happened to the man who was now lying dead in the pool. Following that came the real story of the picture, the one that presented one facet of prismatic Hollywood and its fantastic denizens in its true light. It was picture making of the most supreme kind. But, at the end of that story, and at the picture's end, the audience was suddenly given to realize that the corpse they had seen floating in the pool, in the opening shots, was the hero of the picture and, to their consternation, was also the voice of the narratorl Just what mumbo-jumbo was resorted to to conjure up this trick of reincarnation was never explained by the script writers. They had concocted a trick ending that had sock, and they were satisfied.