Friends Marjorie Reynolds and Verna Hillie leave their small town homes because of problems with parents; Miss Reynolds' widowed father is too oppressive, while Miss Hillie's parents don't give a hoot. They go to work as models in George Douglas' dress shop. Douglas' real profits come from framing men in compromising positions with his models in Jean Yarborough's first feature as a director.
There are some plot holes here, but it struck me that even Gower Gulch features had tightened up immeasurably since the early 1930s. Time is not spent watching people simply cross the room; in westerns, they still show shots of men riding horses at a fast clip, but now it's only about five or ten seconds at a time, instead of twice that long. Dialogue is faster, too. Actors don't talk over each other's lines, but they do answer immediately. Compared to a 1934 film, movies like this crackle right along.
There's a tendency in answering questions like 'why' to settle on a singular answer. I think there are several reasons. First, editing improved. Budgets improved. With the consolidation of many of the smallest producers into Republic, and the rise of the singing cowboys, smaller producers had to raise more money for a production that offered as much as a Gene Autry western or go out of business. They had to give the audience more, and that meant that if a movie like this was still going to come in under 70 minutes, it had to move faster. The audiences were becoming more sophisticated in the language of cinema. It might be another quarter of a century before a plane, then a map with a dotted line could be replaced by Peter O'Toole blowing out a match in Cairo and then striding over a sand dune in Arabia, but it was on its way.
If these tendencies were visible in B westerns, the most conservative and tight-fisted of film genres, how could they not appear in films meant for larger audiences?
There are undoubtedly other reasons that contributed to this trend. Certainly, the fact that movies were a lot more profitable than in 1933 meant that producers were willing to spend more, and new directors, like Jean Yarborough, were comfortable in pushing dialogue at stage speeds. Sound equipment was better, which meant that actors did not have to SPEAK THEIR LINES SLOW, LOUD, AND DIS-TINC-TIVE-LY!
What other things do you think contributed to the speeding-up of movies?
