FLASH BACKS AND VOICES OVER

...Or, at least, it begins as one, with singer Pearl Bailey warning the audience about the comic troubles which have occurred in the household of an eminent cartoonist, where she is maid-of-everybody's-business...

...Yet, precisely because of the virtues of the film, the employment of a similar flash back appears just as dubious...

...For no reason of any organic requirement of the story, the film is told as a flash back...

...There is a narrator, newsreel style, and flash backs—more than a half-dozen—as each character is isolated and his actions related to the instant of the robbery...

...In the documentaries, too, the narrator's voice could take on a tenor of objectivity that was an attraction—and very often a seduction—for those with purposes of persuasion...

...In fact, Stanley Kubrick, a young writer-director, seems to have wanted to create a kind of display piece for his control...

...Thereby he gained a certain advantage for his purpose to represent the differences of outlook of the various groups in India in 1947, just before the British withdrawal...

...The many flash backs sometimes cross and foul each other, like pressure hoses on the loose...

...The stage is set for Hope's unerring delivery of some funny gags, and for some beguiling situation comedy—including a sequence in which Miss Saint charmingly spoofs a girl deliberately getting drunk...

...The same may be said for another filmic element, off-season narration, which is associated quite often with flash backs...

...Nobody can fear, as did the producers of Griffith's Dollie, that audiences may not be able to follow what is intended...

...Kubrick's conception, however, depends upon a use of narration in which the voice "over" the visual material is a voice from nowhere in the configuration of the story...

...In fictional films, the first problem of narration and narrated flash backs is one of viewpoint...

...there is a dissolve (usually), or a wipe (occasionally), or a bold cut (rare) to the scene of which he is reminded...

...No narrator need intrude here, of course, for all to be clear...

...At the end, the money ironically blows away, exposing the wishful thinking that underlies the appeal of films of this genre...

...At the least, this opening informs us that Granger and Miss Gardner are still alive and on affectionate terms, after the stormy events to be depicted...

...But within the film, it is remarkable how little really depends upon it...

...Flash backs may be seen as integral elements of one or even both films on any double bill, and films composed entirely of single or multiple varieties are quite common...

...Weaknesses in screen plays, or in directors' control of action and characterization, seem at present to be the leading occasions for using the device...

...the camera dollies in to a close-up of his pensive face...

...The narrative problem in Bhowani Junction is more complex and seriously ambitious...

...On first glance, we may suspect that Granger's leave-taking from his soldiers, and loving farewell to Ava Gardner at the opening of the film, is a variation of a common corruption of the flash back form, used to indicate at the outset that a happy ending of one sort or another may be expected...

...A man sees or hears something that sets him thinking...

...She returns to the British fold under Granger's auspices, repudiating the Communist agitators who had protected her after the rape attempt only to show their true disregard for life and decency by causing a bloody train wreck...

...The lack of emerging character, or of story substance, is underscored, however, rather than minimized, by Miss Bailey's opening flash back...

...A simple example is provided by That Certain Feeling, a free adaptation by directors-producers Norman Panama and Melvin Frank of the stage comedy, King of Hearts, by Jean Kerr and Eleanor Brooke...

...Can the narrator, as a character, possibly know all that he is relating...

...The form probably has to be traced as far back as the first grandfather who reminisced about his youth, and is familiar in many variations in fiction...

...Narration had its dangers...

...The final absurdity of this device, in fact, is revealed at the close, when Miss Bailey leaves the Sanders' menage with the other principals, in their foregone reconciliation—so that she could not have been able to relate the story while still there, in the first place...

...The war films accustomed audiences to the device as a means for telling stories, as well as giving information, and it has become something of a fad—most often in conjunction with the flash back, as this provides the off-screen voice with an associated character...

...It is no reflection upon Griffith, who did more than any other man to create the form of cinema, to wonder why the movies took even that long to discover the device...

...Off-screen voices, of course, came in with sound films, and although occasionally used in entertainment movies for special effects—as for representing soliloquies, Or for choral accompaniments in musical comedies—did not develop their full influence until the rise of the documentary style in the middle 1930s...

...She describes Eva Marie Saint, his secretary and fiancee, and Bob Hope, her ex-husband, a talented cartoonist who has been unable to hold jobs because of a neurotic dyspepsia that gags his courage whenever he has to face up to employers...

...The propaganda and instructional films of World War II, largely using voices off-screen, affected entertainment films in this respect, as in so many others, establishing narration as something a writer or director could use as a matter of course, rather than as special emphasis...

...then among the Indians, to whom she had been driven after killing a British officer who was trying to rape her...

...But there seems to be a more significant purpose: to provide an off-screen narrator at certain points—not merely to furnish continuity, but to describe Miss Gardner's variable motives and states of mind...

...In the newsreels, narrators tried to achieve a tone of ominous omniscience, freighting each event with catastrophe, present or incipient—as incarnated by the original Voice of Doom of the March of Time series, Westbrook Van Voorhis...

...It may appear that these complications may be kept clear only by such a device as a narrator explaining what is going on—even assuming that Granger is able to know all the circumstances he describes...

...Some traditional melodrama does develop at the close, providing a predictable, bang-up climax in which a Communist kidnaps Miss Gardner and tries to wreck a train carrying Gandhi, only to be foiled by Granger, with the help of his rival, who is conveniently eliminated...

...Flash backs have become an easy convention, with their special power for relating past to present too often wasted upon attempts to remedy narrative failures...

...Miss Bailey tells us that George Sanders is an overbearing ass, whose world-syndicated cartoon is losing its folksy popularity, becoming slick and pompous...

...This opening may have been contrived simply to build up Miss Bailey's part—although this is unnecessary if for no other reason than that her rendition of three songs is the most charming thing in the film...

...The story, from a novel, Clean Break, by Lionel White, is in the style of The Asphalt Jungle and the French Rififi, building suspense out of carefully detailed intricacies of a complicated robbery— then putting the process in reverse, so to speak, by describing how each of the participants loses out...

...John Masters had established precedents for telling the story this way in the novel, which is composed of flash backs from the several viewpoints of the leading characters...

...Flash backs are surely the most common narrative methods of all, expressing the sense, "This reminds me of . . . ," and representing the dependence of the consciousness of the present upon memory of the past...

...Flash Backs and Voices Over By MARTIN S. DWORKIN fyHE first flash back in the movies was used in D. W. Griffith's first work, The Adventures of Dollie, in 1908, five years after the first storytelling film...

...Director George Cukor creates an enormous panorama that is in constant dramatic flux, and is visually sumptuous, in F. A. Young's superb color photogram.CinemaScope...

...A more likely purpose is to introduce the leading characters in a way to establish their personalities by description, rather than by subsequent revelation...

...At stake is the clarity and fundamental integrity of the film—although this is not to deny that a film may be considerably entertaining, even while clearly confusing and obviously trivial...

...But Kubrick does achieve some sharp portraits of the robbers—particularly Sterling Hay-deri as the leader, Elisha Cook as a pathetic squirt married to a tramp, Tim Carey as a pathological marksman, and Kola Kwarian as a philosophical bruiser...

...Each doubles back upon the others, while the narrator drones the exact time, until the moment when they synchronize, and the careful plans to hold up a race track begin ticking together...

...In fact, it is only by an effort of analysis that we can make ourselves aware of this way of telling a story: the pluperfect, as it were, of filmic speech...

...The documentary makers fell too easily into over-narration, attempting to compensate for inadequate visual material by crowding the ears with talk...

...If Bhowani Junction is a huge, complex film burdened unnecessarily by a flash back and narration, The Killing is a small, conventional crime melodrama that utterly depends upon them...

...In entertainment films, narration was employed to describe characters who ought to have been portrayed, or to impart a spuriously documentary quality, as in so many cop-and-robbers melodramas, up to and beyond the prototypal Dragnet, with its endless announcements of the exact time of each trivial occurrence, and its confection of police-blotter patois...

...It is classically cinematic, revealing the film's unique ability to shift in time or mood or subject instantaneously...

...But, trained as we are in the language of cinema, it is difficult to conceive of flash backs except in cinematic terms...

...This is the most common fault of educational and industrial information films to this day...

...From the actors Cukor has drawn sharply defined performanLes—characterizations deep and distinct enough to need no extraneous voice proclaiming thoughts and feelings they ought to be allowed to project...

...then among the British again, after having jilted her Sikh bridegroom during the wedding ceremony...

...The screen adaptation by Sonya Levien and Ivan Moffat, however, dispenses with this approach, and yet it manages, in a romantic story, to convey a great deal of information about the complexities of Indian relations with the British, the politics of the Congress party—and thfe tech* nique contrasts of different religious beliefs, the peculiar problems of the racially mixed Anglo-Indians, arid many other matters, including details of Indian dress and customs...

...The story line is developed in a flash back, with Granger as an occasional off-screen narrator, relating the events to a general with whom he shares a railway compartment...

...To deny use of flash backs is as preposterous as to prohibit one tense or another in discourse...

...Yet, the elements of which films are composed must make sense, poetic or cognitive, as must those of speech...

...These are quite complicated, to be sure, as she tries to discover where she belongs: first among her fellow Anglo-Indians associated with the British, as an officer in the railway service...

...A single narrative viewpoint is established: that of Stewart Granger, a British colonel commanding a regiment of native troops...

...Not even the audience can speak so knowingly, after the film is over...

...The narrator's voice added in the laboratory, speaking "over" the visual content, was a necessary technique for films in which direct sound recording could not be carried on during shooting...