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128 A PRACTICAL MANUAL OF SCREEN PLAYWRITING
as waiting at the curb for the people involved in the main action, inside a house, to make up their minds about leaving with the taxi. In the film The Mudlark the director, Jean Negulescu, photographed a reaction cutaway shot of the servants observing the antics of John Brown, who is trying to teach Wheeler how to open his mouth when feeding himself with a spoon. He shot the servants merely staring down amusedly at the boy. A knowing screen-play writer— and especially one who had observed a mother feeding her infant— would have indicated that the servants' mouths would have opened expectantly, unconsciously aping the boy. This would have been a perfectly natural and humorous reaction.
Unrelated cutaways. When the cutaway is made to an action that is not definitely related to the main action, it is usually on the action of the minor characters in the subplot, in a sort of "in the meantime" position. Thus, while the audience's attention has been concentrated on the main action at the dock, let us say, where the heroine is arriving from Europe, the cutaway— after she is seen embracing her husband— could be to the office of her father-in-law, who may be concocting one of those dastardly schemes inimical in-laws are supposed to inflict on innocent heroines. With this foreshadowing and suspenseful plot line established, the audience's attention could then be returned to the happy lovers at dockside, who are blissfully unconscious of the in-law trouble hovering over them.
It is obvious, then, that the cutaway could be an ideal means of building up suspense. It has been used for this purpose since the beginning of picture making, and is continually resorted to, even today, especially in Westerns and murder mysteries.
Cutaway action-direction. In these pictures, a series of interlocked cutaways is used to climax a chase. In Westerns, for instance, preceding the inevitable clash between the posse and the cattle rustlers, a sequence of short cutaways is inserted. These show first, a shot of the posse, on horse, thundering from left screen to right, across the frame. Immediately following this shot is one showing the rustlers, on horse, riding hell-bent for leather from right screen to left. Another pair of similar cutaway shots— in different locations,