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<\/a><\/p>\nDB here:<\/p>\n
Elsewhere<\/a> I\u2019ve sung the glories of Turner Classic Movies<\/a>. Would that the other basic-cable staple, the Fox Movie Channel<\/a>, were as committed to classic cinema. It\u2019s curious that a studio with a magnificent DVD publishing program (the Ford boxed set, the Murnau\/ Borzage one) is so lackluster in its broadcast offerings. Fox was one of the greatest and most distinctive studios, and its vaults harbor many treasures, including glossy program pictures that would still be of interest to historians and fans. Where, for instance, is Caravan<\/em> (1934), by the \u00e9migr\u00e9 director Erik Charell who made The Congress Dances<\/em> (1931)? Caravan<\/em>‘s elaborate long takes would be eye candy for Ophuls-besotted cinephiles.<\/p>\n Occasionally, though, the Fox schedulers bring out an unexpected treat, such as the sci-fi musical comedy Just Imagine<\/em> (1930). Last month, the main attraction for me was The Power and the Glory<\/em><\/strong> (1933), directed by William K. Howard from a script by Preston Sturges.<\/p>\n This was an elusive rarity in my salad days. As a teenager I read that it prefigured\u00a0Citizen Kane<\/em>, presenting the life of a tycoon in a series of daring flashbacks. I think I first saw it in the late 1960s at a William K. Everson screening at the New School for Social Research. I caught up with it again in 1979, at the Thalia in New York City, on a double bill with The Great McGinty<\/em> (1940). In my files, along with my scrawls on ring-binder paper, is James Harvey\u2019s brisk program note, which includes lines like this: \u201cOne of Sturges\u2019 achievements was to make movies about ordinary people that never ever make us think of the word \u2018ordinary.\u2019\u201d I was finally able to look closely at The Power and the Glory<\/em> while doing research for The Classical Hollywood Cinema<\/em> (1985). The UCLA archive kindly let me see a 16mm print on a flatbed viewer.<\/p>\n So after a lapse of twenty-eight years I revisited P & G<\/em> on the Fox channel last month. It does indeed prefigure Kane<\/em>, but I now realize that for all its innovations it belongs to a rich tradition of flashback movies, and it can be correlated with a shorter-term cycle of them. Rewatching it also teased me to think about flashbacks in general, and to research them a little. You see, I am very fond of what contemporary practitioners like to call broken timelines<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A trick, an old story<\/strong><\/p>\n Although the term flashback<\/em> can be found as early as 1916, for some years it had multiple meanings. Some 1920s writers used it to refer to any interruption of one strand of action by another. At a horse race, after a shot of the horses, the film might \u201cflash back\u201d to the crowd watching. (See “Jargon of the Studio,” New York Times<\/em> for 21 October 1923, X5.) In this sense, the term took on the same meaning as then-current terms like \u201ccut-back\u201d and \u201cswitch-back.\u201d There was also the connotation of speed, as \u201cflash\u201d was commonly used to denote any short shot.<\/p>\n But around 1920 we also find the term being used in our modern sense. You can find it in popular fiction; one short story has its female protagonist remembering something “in a confused flashback.” F. Scott Fitzgerald writes in\u00a0The Beautiful and Damned<\/em> of 1922:<\/p>\n Anthony had a start of memory, so vivid that before his closed eyes there formed a picture, distinct as a flashback on a screen.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n At about the same time writers on theatre start to adopt the term and credit it to film. A historian of drama writes in 1921 of a play that rearranges story order:<\/p>\n The movies had not yet invented the flashback, whereby a thing past may be repeated as a story or a dream in the present.<\/strong><\/p>\n Within film circles, there were signs of an exasperation with the device. One 1921 writer calls the flashback a “murderous assault on the imagination.” Turim quotes a New York Times<\/em> review of His Children\u2019s Children<\/em> (1923):<\/p>\n For once a flash-back, as it is made in this photoplay, is interesting. It was put on to show how the older Kayne came to say his prayers.<\/strong><\/p>\n In the same year, a critic discusses Elmer Rice\u2019s On Trial<\/em>, an influential 1911 stage play. Rice employs <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n a dramatic technique which up to its time was probably unique, though since then the ever recurrent “flash back” of the movies has made the trick an old story.<\/strong><\/p>\n During the 1930s, although some critics and filmmakers employed older terms like \u201cswitch back\u201d and \u201cretrospect,\u201d flashback<\/em> seems to have become the standard label. It denoted any shot or scene that breaks into present-time action to show us something that happened in the past. It probably speaks to the intuitive and informal nature of filmmaking that writers and directors didn\u2019t feel a need to name a technique that they were using confidently for two decades.<\/p>\n The early flashback films pretty much set the pattern for what would come later. Turim shows that all the sorts we find today have their precedents in the 1910s and 1920s. Adapting her typology a little bit, we can distinguish between character-based flashbacks and \u201cexternal\u201d ones.<\/p>\n A character-based flashback may be presented as purely subjective, a person\u2019s private memory, as in Letter to Three Wives<\/em> or The Pawnbroker<\/em> or Across the Universe<\/em>. There\u2019s also the flashback that represents one character\u2019s recounting of past events to another character, a sort of visual illustration of what is told. This flashback is often based on testimony in a trial or investigation (Mortal Thoughts<\/em>, The Usual Suspects<\/em>), but it may simply involve a conversation, as in Leave Her to Heaven<\/em>, Titanic,<\/em> or Slumdog Millionaire<\/em>. It can also be triggered by a letter or diary, as happens with the doubly-embedded journals in The Prestige<\/em>.<\/p>\n An alternative is to break with character altogether and present a purely objective or \u201cexternal\u201d flashback. Here an impersonal narrating authority simply takes us back in time, without justifying the new scene as character memory or as illustration of dialogue. The external flashback is uncommon in classic studio cinema (although see A Man to Remember,<\/a><\/em> 1938<\/a>) but was common in the 1900s and 1910s and has returned in contemporary cinema. Typically the film begins at a point of crisis before a title appears signaling the shift to an earlier period. Recent examples are Michael Clayton<\/em> (“Three days earlier”), Iron Man<\/em> (“36 Hours Before”), and Vantage Point<\/em> (“23 Minutes Earlier”).<\/p>\n In current movies, flashbacks can fall between these two possibilities. Are the flashbacks in The Good Shepherd<\/em> the hero\u2019s recollections (cued by him staring blankly into space) or more objective and external, simply juxtaposing his numb, colorless life with the past disintegration of his family? The point would be relevant if we are trying to assess how much self-knowledge he gains across the present-time action of the film.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Rationales for the flashback<\/strong><\/p>\n What purposes does a flashback fulfill? Why would any storyteller want to arrange events out of chronological order? Structurally, the answers come down to our old friends causality and parallelism.<\/p>\n Most obviously, a flashback can explain why one character acts as she or he does. Classic instances would be Hitchcock\u2019s trauma films like Spellbound<\/em> and Marnie.<\/em> A flashback can also provide information about events that were suppressed or obscured; this is the usual function of the climactic flashback in a detective story, filling in the gaps in our knowledge of a crime.<\/p>\n By juxtaposing two incidents or characters, flashbacks can enhance parallels as well. The flashbacks in The Godfather Part II<\/em> are positioned to highlight the contrasts between Michael Corleone\u2019s plotting and his father\u2019s rise to power in the community. Citizen Kane<\/em>\u2019s flashbacks are famous for juxtaposing events in the hero\u2019s life to bring out ironies or dramatic contrasts.<\/p>\n Of course, flashbacks need not explain or clarify things; they can make things more complicated too. We tend to think of the \u201clying flashback\u201d as a modern invention (a certain Hitchcock film has become the prototype), but Turim shows that The Goose Woman<\/em> (1925) and Footloose Widows<\/em> (1926) did the same thing, although not with the same surprise effect. Kristin points out to me that an even earlier example is The Confession<\/em> (1920), in which a witness at a trial supplies two different versions of a killing we have already (sort of) seen.<\/p>\n At the limit, flashbacks can block our ability to understand characters and plot actions. This is perhaps best illustrated by Last Year at Marienbad<\/em>, but the dynamic is already there in Jean Epstein\u2019s La Glace \u00e0 trois faces<\/em> (\u201cThe Three-Sided Mirror,\u201d 1927).<\/p>\n I argue in Poetics of Cinema<\/em> that, at bottom, flashbacks are tactics fulfilling a broader strategy: breaking up the story\u2019s chronological order. You can begin the film at a climactic moment; once the viewers are hooked, they will wait for you to move back to set things up. You can create mystery about an event that the plot has skipped over, then answer the question through a flashback. You can establish parallels between past and present that might not emerge so clearly if the events were presented in 1-2-3 order. Consequently, you can justify the switch in time by setting up characters as recalling the past, or as recounting it to others.<\/p>\n Having a character remember or recount the past might seem to make the flashback more \u201crealistic,\u201d but flashbacks usually violate plausibility. Even \u201csubjective\u201d flashbacks usually present objective (and reliable) information. More oddly, both memory-flashbacks and telling-flashbacks usually show things that the character didn\u2019t, and couldn\u2019t, witness.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t suggest that recollections and recountings are merely alibis for time-juggling. They bring other appeals into the storytelling mix, such as allegiance with characters, pretexts for point-of-view experimentation, and so on. Still, the basic purpose of nonchronological plotting, I think, is to pattern information across the film\u2019s unfolding so as to shape our state of knowledge and our emotional response in particular ways. Scene by scene and moment by moment, flashbacks play a role in pricking our curiosity about what came before, promoting suspense about what will happen next, and enhancing surprise at any moment.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A trend becomes a tradition<\/strong><\/p>\n Also well-established was the extended insert model. Here we start with a critical situation that triggers a flashback (either subjective or external), and this occupies most of the movie. Digging around, I found these instances, but I haven’t seen all of them; some don’t apparently survive.<\/p>\n An interesting variant of this format is Beyond Victory<\/em>, a 1931 RKO release. The plot presents four soldiers on the battlefield, each one recalling his courtship of the woman he loves back home. The principle of assembling flashbacks from several characters was at this point prised free of the courtroom setting, and multiple-viewpoint flashbacks became important for investigation plots like Affairs of a Gentleman<\/em> (1934), Through Different Eyes <\/em>(1942), The Grand Central Murder<\/em> (1942), and of course Citizen Kane<\/em>, itself a sort of mystery tale.<\/p>\n Why this burst of flashback movies? It’s a good question for research. One place to look would be literary culture. The technique of flashback goes back to Homer, and it recurs throughout the history of both oral and written narrative. Literary modernism, however, made writers highly conscious of the possibility of scrambling the order of events. From\u00a0middlebrow items like The Bridge of San Luis Rey <\/em>(1927) to\u00a0high-cultural works by Dos Passos and Faulkner, elaborate flashbacks became organizing principles for entire novels.\u00a0It’s likely that Sturges, a Manhattanite of wide literary culture, was keenly aware of this trend.<\/p>\n It’s just as likely that he noticed similar developments in another medium. By 1931, when Katharine Seymour and J. T. W. Martin published How to Write for Radio<\/em> (New York: Longmans, Green), they could devote considerable discussion to frame stories and flashbacks in radio drama (pp. 115-137). Especially interesting for Sturges’ film, radio programs were letting the voice of the announcer or the storyteller drift in and out of the action that was taking place in the past.<\/p>\n For whatever reasons, the technique became more common. The year 1933 saw several flashback films besides The Power and the Glory<\/em>. In the didactic exploitation item Suspicious Mothers<\/em>, a woman recounts her wayward path to redemption. Mr. Broadway<\/em> offers an extensive embedded story using footage from another film (a common practice in the earliest days). Terror Aboard<\/em> begins with the discovery of corpses on a foundering yacht, followed by an extensive flashback tracing what led up the calamity. A borderline case is the what-if movie Turn Back the Clock<\/em> (1933). Ever-annoying Lee Tracy plays a small businessman run down by a car. Under anesthesia, he reimagines his life as it might have been had he married the girl he once courted. Call it a rough draft for the \u201chypothetical flashbacks\u201d that Resnais was to exploit in his great La Guerre est finie<\/em>.<\/p>\n The point of this cascade of titles is that in writing The Power and the Glory<\/em>, Sturges was working with a set of conventions already in wide circulation. His inventiveness stands out in two respects: the handling of voice-over and the ordering of the flashbacks.<\/p>\n Now I\u2019m about to divulge details of The Power and the Glory<\/em>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Narratage, anyone?<\/strong><\/p>\n The film begins with what became a commonplace opening gesture of film, fiction, and nonfiction biography: the death of the protagonist. We are at the funeral of Thomas Garner, railroad tycoon. His best friend and assistant Henry slips out of the service. After visiting the company office, Henry returns home. Sitting in the parlor with him, his wife castigates Garner as a wicked man. \u201cIt\u2019s a good thing he killed himself.\u201d So we have the classic setup of retrospective suspense<\/a>: We know the outcome but become curious about what led up to it.<\/p>\n Henry\u2019s defense of Garner launches a series of flashbacks. As a boyhood friend, Henry can take us to three stages of the great man\u2019s life: adolescence, young manhood, and late middle age. Scenes from these time periods are linked by returns to the narrating situation, when Henry\u2019s wife will break in with further criticisms of Garner.<\/p>\n Sturges boasted in a letter to his father: \u201cI have invented an entirely new method of telling stories,\u201d explaining that it combines silent film, sound film, and \u201cthe storytelling economy and the richness of characterization of a novel.\u201d At the time, the Paramount publicists trumpeted that the film employed a new storytelling technique labeled narratage<\/em>, a wedding of \u201cnarrating\u201d and \u201cmontage.\u201d One publicity item called it \u201cthe greatest advance in film entertainment since talking pictures were introduced.\u201d Hyperbole aside, what did Sturges have in mind?<\/p>\n There is evidence that some screenwriters were rethinking their craft after the arrival of sound filming. Exhibit A is Tamar Lane\u2019s book, The New Technique of Screen Writing<\/em> (McGraw-Hill, 1936). Lane suggests that the talking picture\u2019s promise will be fulfilled best by a \u201ccomposite\u201d construction blending various media. From the stage comes dialogue technique and sharp compression of action building to a strong climax. From the novel comes a sense of spaciousness, the proliferation of characters, a wider time frame, and multiple lines of action. Cinema contributes its own unique qualities as well, such as the control of tempo and a \u201cpictorial charm\u201d (p. 28) unattainable on the stage or page.<\/p>\n Vague as Lane\u2019s proposal is, it suggests a way to think about the development of Hollywood screenwriting at the time. Many critics and theorists believed that the solution to the problem of talkies was to minimize speech; this is still a common conception of how creative directors dealt with sound. But Lane acknowledged that most films would probably rely on dialogue. The task was to find engaging ways to present it. Several films had already explored some possibilities, the most notorious probably being Strange Interlude<\/em> (1932). In this MGM prestige product, the soliloquys spoken by characters in O\u2019Neill\u2019s play are rendered as subjective voice-over. The result, unfortunately, creates a broken tempo and overstressed acting. A conversation will halt, and through changes of facial expression the performer signals that what we\u2019re now hearing is purely mental.<\/p>\n The Power and the Glory<\/em> responds to the challenge of making talk interesting in a more innovative way. For one thing, there is the sheer pervasiveness of the voice-over narration. We’re so used to seeing films in which the voice-over commentary weaves in and out of a scene’s dialogue that we forget that this was once a rarity. Most flashback films in the early sound era had used the voice-over to lead into a past scene, but in\u00a0The Power and the Glory<\/em>, Henry describes what we see as we see it.<\/p>\n Most daringly, in one scene Henry\u2019s voice-over substitutes for the dialogue entirely. Young Tom and Sally are striding up a mountainside, and he\u2019s summoning up the nerve to propose marriage. What we hear, however, is Henry at once commenting on the action and speaking the lines spoken by the couple, whose voices are never heard.<\/p>\n This scene, often commented upon by critics then and now, seems have exemplified what Sturges late in life recalled \u201cnarratage\u201d to be. Describing that technique in his autobiography, he wrote: \u201cThe narrator\u2019s, or author\u2019s, voice spoke the dialogue while the actors only moved their lips\u201d (p. 272).<\/p>\n So one of Sturges\u2019 innovations was to use the voice-over not only to link scenes but to comment on the action as it played out. In her pioneering book Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film<\/em> (Univesity of California Press, 1988), Sarah Kozloff has argued that the pervasiveness of Henry\u2019s narration has no real precedent in Hollywood, and few successors until 1939 (pp. 31-33). (There’s one successor in Sacha Guitry’s Roman d’un tricheur<\/em>.) The novelty of the device may have led Sturges and Howard toward redundancies that we find a little labored today. The transitions into the past from the frame story are given rather emphatically, with Henry\u2019s voice-over aided by camera movements that drift away from the couple. (Compare the crisp shifts in Midnight Mary<\/em>, below.) Henry’s comments during the action are sometimes accentuated by diagonal veils that drift briefly over the shot, as if assuring us that this speech isn\u2019t coming from the scene we see.<\/p>\n The “montage” bit of “narratage” also invokes the idea of a series of sequences guided by the voice-over narrator. The concept might also have encompassed the most famous innovation of The Power and the Glory:<\/em> Sturges\u2019 decision to make Henry\u2019s flashbacks non-chronological.<\/p>\n Even today, most flashback films adhere to 1-2-3 order in presenting their embedded, past-tense action. But Sturges noticed that in real life people often recount events out of order, backing and filling or free-associating. So he organized The Power and the Glory<\/em> as a series of blocks. Each block contains several scenes from either boyhood, youth, or middle age. Within each block, the scenes proceed chronologically, but the narration skips around among the blocks.<\/p>\n For example, a block of boyhood scenes gives way to a set showing Garner, now in middle age, ordering around his board of directors. The next cluster of flashbacks returns to Garner\u2019s youth and his courtship of his first wife, Sally. Then we are carried back to his middle age, with scenes showing Garner alienated from Sally and his son Tommy but also attracted to the young woman Eve. And from there we return to Garner\u2019s early married life with Eve.<\/p>\n To keep things straight, Sturges respects chronology along another dimension. Not only do the scenes within each block follow normal order, but the plotlines developing across the three phases of Garner\u2019s life are given 1-2-3 treatment. In one block of flashbacks, we see Tom and Sally courting. When we return to that stage of their lives in another block, they are happily married. The next time we see Garner as a young man, he is improving himself by attending college. The later romance with Eve develops in a similar step-by-step fashion across the blocks devoted to middle age.<\/p>\n A major effect of the shuffling of periods is ironic contrast. Maureen Turim points out that seeing different phases of Garner\u2019s life side by side points up changes and disparities. In his youth, Tom watches the birth of his son with awe; in the next scene, we are reminded what a wastrel young Tommy turned out to be.<\/p>\n The juxtaposition of time frames also nuances character development. As Sally ages, she turns into something of a nag, quarreling with her husband and pampering Tommy. But in the next sequence we see her young, ambitiously pushing Tom to succeed and willing to undergo sacrifice by taking up his job as a railroad track-walker. The next scenes show Tom in class and in a bar while Sally walks the desolate tracks in a blizzard. She has given up a lot for her husband. In the next scene, set in middle age, Garner confesses his love to Eve but says he could never leave Sally, and the juxtaposition with Sally\u2019s solitary track-walking suggests that he recognizes her sacrifice. And in the following scene, when Sally comes to Garner\u2019s office, she admits that she has become disagreeable and asks if they couldn\u2019t take a trip to reignite their love. The juxtaposition of scenes has turned a caricatural shrew into a woman who is a more complex mixture of devotion, disenchantment, and self-awareness.<\/p>\n Other characters aren\u2019t given this degree of shading\u2014Tommy is pretty much a wastrel, Eve a vamp\u2014but another married couple deepens the central parallel. Meek Henry is dominated by his wife, but by the end she is chastened by what she learns of Garner\u2019s real motives. Critic Andy Horton, in his helpful introduction to Sturges’ published screenplay, indicates that this couple adds a note of contentment to what is otherwise a pretty sordid melodrama of adultery and quasi-incest.<\/p>\n The innovative flashbacks and voice-overs are an important part of the film\u2019s appeal, but director William K. Howard supplied some craftsmanship of his own. Particularly striking are some silhouette effects, low angles, and deep-focus compositions that underscore the parallels between Sally\u2019s suicide and Garner\u2019s impending death.<\/p>\n The original screenplay suggests that Sturges intended to push his innovations further. About halfway through, he starts to break down the time-blocks. In the script, Sally visits Garner while he\u2019s working on a bridge. The next scene shows their son Tommy already grown and spoiled, being taken back into his father\u2019s good graces. Then the script returns to the bridge, where Sally tells Tom she\u2019s pregnant. The interruption of the bridge scene reminds us of how badly their child turned out.<\/p>\n The script jumps back to the birth of the baby. In the film the birth scene plays out in its entirety, but in the screenplay Sturges cuts it off by the scene (retained in the film) showing Garner\u2019s marriage to Eve. The final moments of the birth scene, when Garner prays (\u201cThou art the power and the glory\u201d), become in the script the very end of the film. Coming after Tom\u2019s death at the hand of his son, this epilogue is a bitter pill, rendered all the harder to take by providing no return to Henry and his wife.<\/p>\n The greater fragmentation of the second part of the script, along with Garner\u2019s death as a sort of murder-suicide and the failure to return to the narrating frame, is striking. It\u2019s as if Sturges felt he could take more chances, counting on his viewers\u2019 familiarity with current flashback conventions and on his film\u2019s firmly established time-shuttling method. But if, as sources report, Sturges\u2019 script was initially filmed exactly as written, then it seems likely that the film\u2019s June 1933 preview provoked the changes we find in the finished product. \u201cThe first half of the picture,\u201d he remarked in a letter, \u201cwent magnificently, but the storytelling method was a little too wild for the average audience to grasp and the latter half of the picture went wrong in several spots. We have been busy correcting this and the arguments and conferences have been endless.\u201d<\/p>\n Even the compromised film proved difficult for audiences. Tamar Lane, proponent of the \u201ccomposite\u201d form suitable for the sound cinema, felt that the \u201cretrospects\u201d in The Power and the Glory<\/em> were too numerous and protracted. Nonetheless, he praised it for its \u201cradical and original cinema handling\u201d (p.34). That handling rested upon tradition\u2014a tradition that in turn encouraged innovations. Once flashbacks had become solid conventions, Sturges could risk pushing them in fresh directions.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Mary remembers<\/strong><\/p>\n Finally, two more flashy flashback movies from 1933. Some spoilers.<\/p>\n Midnight Mary<\/em><\/strong> (MGM, William Wellman) works a twist on the courtroom template. The defendant Mary Martin is introduced jauntily reading a magazine while the prosecutor demands that the jury find her guilty of murder. This also sets up a nice little motif of shots highlighting Loretta Young’s lustrous eyes. The motif pays off with a soft-focus shot of her in jail just before the climax.<\/p>\n As the opening scene ends, Mary is led to a clerk\u2019s office to wait for the verdict. There’s an automatic dose of suspense (Will she be found guilty?) but there\u2019s also considerable curiosity: Whom has she killed? How was she caught?<\/p>\n These questions won\u2019t be answered for some time. Lounging in the clerk\u2019s office, Mary runs her eye runs across the annual reports filling his shelves. The flashbacks, which comprise most of the film, are introduced as close-ups of the volumes\u2019 spines\u20141919, 1923, 1926, 1927, and so on up to the present. They serve as neatly motivated equivalents of those clich\u00e9d calendar pages that ripple through montage sequences of the 1930s.<\/p>\n The flashbacks are motivated as subjective; Mary doesn\u2019t recount her life to the clerk but simply reviews it in her mind. Unlike the flashbacks in The Power and the Glory<\/em>, they are chronological and without gaps. Nothing is skipped over to be revealed later. As usual, though, once Mary\u2019s recollections have triggered the rearrangement of story order, the flashbacks are filmed as any ordinary scenes would be, including bits of action that she isn\u2019t present to witness. The film is a good example of using the extended-flashback convention chiefly to delay the resolution of the climactic action. Told in chronological order, Mary\u2019s tale of woe would have had much less suspense.<\/p>\n Transitions between present and past are areas open to innovation, and early sound filmmakers took advantage of them. In Midnight Mary<\/em>, the long flashback closes with gangsters pounding on the door of Mary\u2019s boudoir; this sound continues across the dissolve to the present, with Mary roused from her reverie by a knock on the clerk\u2019s office door. Earlier, one transition into the past begins with Mary blowing cigarette smoke toward the bound volumes on the shelf.<\/p>\n Dissolve to a close-up of one book as smoke wafts over it, and then to a shot of Mary\u2019s gangster boyfriend blowing cigarette smoke out before he sets up a robbery..<\/p>\n At one point the narration supplies a surprise by abruptly shifting into the present. Once Mary has become a prostitute, she is slumped over a barroom table in sorrow, while her pal Bunny consoles her. In a tight shot, Bunny (Una Merkel, always welcome), leans over and says: \u201cOh, what\u2019s the diff, Mary? A girl\u2019s gotta live, ain\u2019t she?\u201d<\/p>\n Cut directly to the present, with Mary murmuring: \u201cNot necessarily, Bunny. The jury\u2019s still out on that.\u201d<\/p>\n Mary\u2019s reply casts Bunny\u2019s question about needing to live in a new light, since Mary is facing execution, and the use of the stereotyped phrase, \u201cThe jury\u2019s still out,\u201d now with a double meaning, reminds us of the present-tense crisis. It is a more crisp and concise link than the transitions we get in The Power and the Glory.<\/em> But then, Wellman has no need for continuous voice-over, which gives the Sturges\/ Howard film its more measured pace.<\/p>\n Filmmakers were concerned with finding storytelling techniques appropriate to the sound film, and these unpredictable links between sequences became characteristic of the new medium. Similar links had appeared in silent films, but they gained smoothness and extra dimensions of meaning when the images were blended with dialogue or music. For more on transitional hooks, go here<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Nora and narratage<\/strong><\/p>\n The hooks between scenes are perhaps the least outrageous stretches of The Sin of Nora Moran<\/em><\/strong>, a Majestic release that, thanks to a gorgeous restoration and a DVD release, has rightly earned a reputation as the nuttiest B-film of the 1930s.<\/p>\n It is a flashback frenzy, boxes within boxes. A District Attorney tells the governor\u2019s wife to burn the apparently incriminating love letters she\u2019s found. In explaining why, the D. A. introduces a flashback (or is it a cutaway?) to Nora in prison. We then move into Nora\u2019s mind and see her hard life, the low point occurring when she\u2019s raped by a lion tamer.<\/p>\n Now we start shuttling between the D. A. telling us about Nora and Nora remembering, or dreaming up, traumatic events. At some points, characters in her flashbacks tell her that what she\u2019s experiencing is not real. In one hazy sequence, her circus pal Sadie materializes in her cell to remind Nora that she killed a man. (Actually, she didn\u2019t.) At other moments Nora\u2019s flashbacks include moments in which she says that if she does something differently, it<\/em> will change\u2014it<\/em> being the outcome of the story. At this point another character will point out that they can\u2019t change the outcome because it has already happened . . . of course, since this is a flashback.<\/p>\n By the end, after the governor has had his own flashback to the end of his affair with Nora and after she appears as a floating head, things have gotten out of hand. The rules, if there are any, keep changing. And the whole farrago is propelled by furious montage sequences built out of footage scavenged from other films.<\/p>\n Publicity and critical response around The Sin of Nora Moran<\/em> implied that the movie followed the \u201cnarratage\u201d method. There was surely some influence. Scenes contain fairly continuous voice-over commentary, and director Phil Goldstone occasionally drops in the diagonal veil used in The Power and the Glory<\/em>. But on the whole this delirious Poverty Row item falls outside the strict contours of Sturges\u2019 experiment. Nora Moran<\/em> blurs the line separating flashbacks and fantasy scenes, and it illustrates how easily we can lose track of what time zone we\u2019re in. Watching it, I had a flashback of my own\u2014to Joseph Cornell\u2019s Rose Hobart<\/em>, another compilation revealing that Hollywood conventions are only a few steps from phantasmagorias.<\/p>\n Unwittingly, Nora Moran<\/em>\u2019s peculiarities point forward to the flashback\u2019s golden age, the 1940s and early 1950s. Then we got contradictory flashbacks, flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks, flashbacks from the point of view of a corpse (Sunset Boulevard<\/em>) or an Oscar statuette (Susan Slept Here<\/em>). Filmmakers knew they had found a good thing, and they weren\u2019t going to let it go.<\/p>\n The original screenplay of The Power and the Glory<\/em> is included in Andrew Horton, ed., Three More Screenplays by Preston Sturges<\/em> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Sturges\u2019 reflections from the late 1950s are to be found in Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges: His Life in His Words<\/em>, ed. Sandy Sturges (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990). The quotations from Sturges\u2019 letters and from publicity about \u201cnarratage\u201d can be found in Diane Jacobs, Christmas in July: The Life and Art of Preston Sturges<\/em> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 123-129 and James Curtis, Between Flops: A Biography of Preston<\/em> Sturges (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 87.<\/p>\n My citatations of literary uses of the term come from Elliott Field, “A Philistine in Arcady,” The Black Cat<\/em> 24, 10 (July 1919), 33; Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned<\/em> (1922), available here<\/a>, 433; Samuel A. Eliot, Jr., ed., Little Theater Classics<\/em> vol. 3 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1921), 120; The Outlook<\/em> (11 May 1921), 49, available here<\/a>; \u00a0review of His Children’s Children<\/em>, quoted in Turim p. 29; commentary on On Trial<\/em>, in The<\/em> New York Times<\/em> (25 March, 1923), X2.<\/p>\n For more on the history of flashback construction, apart from Maureen Turim\u2019s Flashbacks in Film<\/em>, see Barry Salt\u2019s Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis<\/em>, 2nd<\/sup> ed. (London: Starword, 1992), especially 101-102, 139-141. There are discussions of the technique throughout David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960<\/em> (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), especially 42-44.<\/p>\n<\/a>On our subject for today, the indispensible book, which ought to be brought back into print or archived online, is Maureen Turim\u2019s Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History<\/em> (Routledge, 1989). We may think of the flashback as a modern technique, but Turim shows that flashbacks have been a mainstay of filmic storytelling since the 1910s.<\/p>\n<\/a>When The Power and the Glory<\/em> was released in August 1933, it was part of a cycle of flashback films. The Trial of Mary Dugan<\/em> (1929), The Trial of Vivienne Ware<\/em> (1932), and other courtroom films rendered testimony in flashbacks. A film might also wedge a brief or extended flashback into an ongoing plot. The most influential instance was probably Smilin\u2019 Through<\/em> (1931), which is notable for using a crane shot through a garden to link present and past.<\/p>\n\n
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