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finally, the steady deterioration from admiration to hostility is most powerfully suggested by the acting.
Dialogue, rate of cutting, music and acting (and, incidentally, the costumes) have all been used to convey the precise state of the relationship in each episode. This precision has led to a striking economy. (Note, for instance, that the passages of time between adjacent breakfasts are implied by the merest hint : a flickering image lasting a second and a change of clothes.) In under 200 feet of film, an extremely intricate development has been conveyed with clarity and assurance.
This conciseness of presentation is obviously the result of thorough script preparation. (The very choice of breakfast as the setting for the conversations was an inspiration !) There is nothing fortuitous about the order and relation of the separate impressions — as is so often the case with the unscripted formula kind of montage — and the passage has been conceived as a complete entity already in the script.
Unlike the continuity-link montage, this passage has considerable dramatic power. The montage form is used because it happens to be the most fitting method of presentation. Indeed, it is difficult to see how the gradual change in the relationship between the two characters could have been so economically conveyed in another way. But having decided that the situation needs to be shown in a series of flashes, it was still necessary to provide a good dramatic reason for showing it in this way.
It might indeed be objected that the passage is artificial in its method of presentation and therefore does not carry the conviction of straight narrative. The objection would be valid if the passage were placed in the middle of a straightforward film. Actually, its framework is the flash-back of Leyland's reminiscences, and Leyland, it has been previously established, is giving a cynical, strongly biased account : the sequence is seen as if through a distorting mind. Thus although the treatment comes dangerously near to caricature, it is justified by the setting. There is a dramatic reason for showing the events in over-simplified montage form : Leyland, we are prepared to imagine, is describing Kane's marriage in a series of pointedly exaggerated impressions and that is the way we are ready to see it.
Similarly well founded montage sequences, which are quite different in mood, occur in such diverse films as Pygmalion and On the Town. We need only mention them briefly. In Pygmalion, there is a sequence in which Liza Doolittle (Wendy Hiller) starts
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