Daily Dialogue — January 1, 2018

Eve Gill: Any sign of the police?
Jonathan Cooper: No, no sign. Looks like we’re getting away with it.
Eve Gill: Good.
Jonathan Cooper: How far is it to your father’s boat?
Eve Gill: Two hours, with luck. Your luck seems to be very good. Touching wood.

— Stage Fright (1950), screen play by Whitfield Cook, adaptation by Alma Reville, based on a novel by Selwyn Jepson

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Flashback.

Trivia: This movie is significant because it broke a long-established cinematic convention that flashbacks were always a true account of earlier events. In this film, though, the opening flashback turns out to be a lie, a device which at first baffled then enraged cinemagoers who felt that they had in some way been cheated.

Dialogue On Dialogue: The dialogue is how the movie begins, but it’s the flashback sequence — some 13 minutes long — with its transitional dissolves between present and past which is one of the most notable features of the movie. As noted above, the flashback is false, a case of an unreliable narrator.