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l8o A PRACTICAL MANUAL OF SCREEN PLAYWRITING
do they begin to get into the action itself. But, even then they do not leap into the action with a bang. Instead, they build to it slowly— again, naturally— piling incident upon incident, scene upon scene, until the vital action is reached. That done, the pace is quickened. But not too fast. The fast tempo is left until the end of the picture, where it properly belongs, using the most effective building techniques. For interspersed with the action are bits of comedy and crisis relief— sometimes seemingly unrelated to the story line— as were the idle cricket-talk scenes interposed in Hitchcock's exciting The Lady Vanishes. Also interspersed are seemingly incongruous bits of character development.
This character development is not confined to the principals only. For the British believe that minor characters should not be slighted. They are seldom introduced with a single characterizing line of dialogue, on the order of "Gee! my feet are killing me!" from a salesgirl; or "I hate driving cabs!" from a philosophical cab driver. Instead, they linger a little longer on the character, so as to round him out sufficiently, to make certain he fits in with the well-rounded character development of the principal characters. In The 39 Steps, for instance, the minor characters of the Scottish farmer and his young wife were not only fully developed, but their dramatic story was injected into the main story line.
The reason for this emphasis on minor character development is that the British believe that both elements must be completely integrated if they are to be presented successfully. In art, the background must be integrated with the foreground, to give suitable and esthetically satisfactory prominence to the foreground material. If the background material is slighted, the foreground material will suffer. In the same way, the British believe that if the principal characters and their story line are not backed up with well-rounded characters involved in a subplot, then the main story line will not be presented in its proper perspective.
This method, however, does not always result in felicitous pictures. Sometimes there is an almost robot-like adherence to the tenets of building. Too often a scene is designed to build with the traditional medium shot, close shot, close-up, medium shot, long shot progression. Then it comes to a crisis, with the same process starting all over again in succeeding scenes. Because of this, a me