New Way To Show Chase On Screen

Dominion, Volume 35, Issue 8, 4 October 1941, Page 5

New Way To Show Chase On Screen

QOME time around the period of “The Great Train Robbery,” the first movie that told a story, film producers discovered the truism that moving pictures must move. Since then, with the exception of the period immediately following the advent of sound, a large part of their time has been spent in devising methods of producing this motion. The most effective device has always been the “chase,” which ranges in refinement from the simple galloping horse in westerns, to the subtle ramifications of a Hitchcock pursuit. All techniques were, nevertheless, basically the same till the advent of “So Ends Our Night,” the new David L. Loew-Albert Lewin production, which is said to present in both conception and execution a new formula for imparting the illusion of motion to a picture. The plot of “So Ends Our Night” is a chase itself, for it depicts the romances and adventures of a small group of people as they flee from oye European country to another. Usually such a flight would be indicated in a picture by the actual peregrinations of the characters., either in montage sequences or in transit. But in' “So Ends Our Night” this method was reversed. Instead of the characters moving against the background, the sense of motion and distance covered is achieved by moving the background behind the characters.

To accomplish this 158 sets were constructed, the largest number ever employed in a film, not excluding “Gone With the Wind” which had 80. William Cameron Menzies, production designer, worked in his unique way but on a much larger scale than usual. He makes preliminary sketches of every set, every camera angle, and every piece of business to be. used and then combines them into a master set of drawings which serve as a guide for everyone connected with the production. Working on an ordinary production, Menzies usually makes between 2500 and 3000 sketches before his work is finished, but for “So Ends Our Night” the number of drawings was more than the number used for a fulllength animated cartoon. Using this number of sets involved another innovation —three camera units working simultaneously. This was necessary if the picture was to be finished anywhere within the 55-day shooting schedule. One unit shot the action while the second set up for the

next scene and photographed inserts and pick-ups. The third was on location getting background material for process shots. This new technique iu handling the chase formula has three results. It makes it possible for the pace of the story to be rigidly controlled, it makes apparent, in a new way, the picture’s geographical scope, and, most important, it allows for an uuhackneyed method of following the edict that motion pictures must move.-