The screen writer (Apr-Oct 1948)

themselves, for which this plot lossening was undertaken, sag for want of the deeds through which character clearly reveals itself in a motion picture. Despite perception of character motivation on the part of the creators, the characters become tiresome and even downright irritating. At this point, cynics "hail" the film as "done in the foreign style" and smirkingly point to the meager grosses as evidence that mass audiences "are not ready" for "art" films. SUCCESSES and failures alike, made in Hollywood and in other countries, give ample evidence that an art form such as motion pictures, requires, that what a man or woman is, be disclosed through what he or she does. Another aspect of this requirement imposed by action is something we take for granted, though we should not. Unlike the play, which has mandatory intermissions, and the novel, which has voluntary ones at the election of the reader, the film has none. Hence, the film, frequently longer than a play, and covering as much emotional and factual ground as a novel is taken in one single lose. The action dynamics of film make this possible as well as necessary. But with these action dynamics comes the ability of the audience to keep every aspect of the story in mind throughout the two hours. That in turn imposes the demand for absolute cohesion for economic and single-purposed continuity of story. The effort at subtlety and indirection must fulfill itself within these rigid requirements. This problem exists not only in terms of the picture as a whole and all of its characters but finally it exists in each and every scene in each and every gesture and line of dialogue. It is difficult, in one discussion to detail the manner in which plot is the foundation for characterization and why one can be no stronger than the other. Perhaps proving this connection in small pieces is the most one can hope to accomplish in this limited time. Three examples come to mind. The Informer, The Best Years of Our Lives, Monsieur Verdoux. In The Informer, Gyppo, in his desperate poverty and slow-wittedness, turns informer and betrays his closest friend for a cash reward which he hopes will give him a chance at a cleaner, better life. The Judas money in his pocket and whiskey in his head, he starts carousing. Giddy and gay, he turns up at the wake of his buddy, now dead as a result of his betrayal. In the anguished silence of the room, Gyppo drops his coins and they clatter on the hardwood floor. The bereaved mother and all of the visitors turn and stare as Gyppo, kneeling on all fours, starts to pick up the blood money. The coffin of his buddy remains visible in the background. Having accumulated the coins, Gyppo, on an impulse, hands them to his dead buddy's mother and with all the agony inside him, he blurts out : "I am sorry for your troubles, Mrs. MacLagherty." One line of dialogue in over 150 feet of film! Later, as he squanders the reward, and with it, his unrealizable dream, his brief moment of returning self-esteem rests upon his physical strength, his unspent brute power which lay dormant through unemployment and ignorance. His untapped physical force, is the central dramatic element of character. To disclose this, the director surrounds McLaglen with medium sized and short people and with great subtlety builds a sign jutting out over a store window on the street. A long shot captures Gyppo, whiskey bottle in hand, approaching. Before he reaches this sign, many people have walked under it, with a good 12 inches to spare between their heads and the sign. When Gyppo approaches the sign, his head crashes through it, causing the sign to whirl on its axis and this single piece of action, plus a sense of composition in size contrasts, is all that is required to bring this sequence to its height with one word of dialogue! McLaglen pauses, hurls a man into the street, hurls the whiskey bottle through the window, beats himself on the chest with both hands and shouts his lost identity: "Gyppo!" I" N The Best Years of Our Lives, -^-Dana Andrews, the war hero, fighter-plane pilot, wanders in his dis illusionment with postwar life, into a junk heap. Drunk and bitter, he stumbles into a scrapped plane and sits at its wheel. With the aid of music, the character is called upon to recapture all of the self-respect, sense of social usefulness and joy that were his when he guided his plane as part of the military campaign for human freedom. The scene ends with Andrews in a cold sweat, suddenly sober, suddenly realizing that he cannot abandon his high wartime hopes with so little postwar struggle. In a novel, such a set-up would be trash. In film it is art. ^wJOW let us take Monsieur Ver■* ^ doux. I am not interested in debates concerning Chaplin the citizen, Chaplin, the man. It would take a great deal of blind partisanship to deny that Chaplin, the artist, is the only active film maker in Hollywood today who grew up through the early one and two reelers, learned the hidden secret of motion in motion pictures, brought to it a rare knowledge of music, choreography, pantomime, poetry, playwriting and narrative, and mastered the synthesis as no one else has done. The dramatic problem of the opening of Monsieur Verdoux, is that of demonstrating that a browbeaten bank clerk, incredibly naive, and seeking security for his invalid wife and family, loses his job and then comes to the macabre conclusion that the Success Story of Big Business is that it is perfectly moral and sound to murder others in order to achieve security for your intimate loved ones. At heart, this bank clerk is not a murderer. He is repelled by violence. He is simply following, by his distorted and befuddled lights, the success story, but all this time he remains the naive bank clerk and this limitation is his ultimate undoing. To communicate this dichotomy between a man's character and the task he has undertaken, would, in a novel, require no less than 70 pages, tracing his environment and his inner dynamics. A screenplay writer, less gifted than Chaplin, and with less mastery of the fact that on film, characterization is disclosed through action, would have required no less 22 The Screen Writer, May, 194