Structure

This is avuncular, pipe-smoking Jean Hersholt, whose name is immortal because it's read out at the Academy Awards every year. They give a Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for somebody in Beverly Hills who's given a lot of time and effort to charitable works as well as the usual backstabbing and crawling that gets you awards in Hollywood. And this is an unusual role for him in this film. He normally played the nice guys in movies. Well, he started out as kind of baddies. He was the Karloff role in the first version of The Climax, which

16:50 · jump to transcript →

If we look at this film again as being entirely about making a fool of Jean Hersholt, yeah, and imagine all the other characters are giggling a bit when he gets more and more scared. Exactly. It makes sense. It's like when they say you should watch backwards. Yes, yeah. From the climax and watch it backwards and see actually how clever it is as a piece of construction.

25:03 · jump to transcript →

But it's great. I mean, again, by this point in the film, we're now building towards the climax. We're only into the end of the second act. We've pretty much got all the other stuff out the way now. Yeah, and the climax then goes off in a completely different direction. Absolutely. We've spent all this time and money setting up this vampire scam to get the guy, but they do something else. You know, it's the old... And this, I think, is one of the creepiest moments in it. Well, particularly because they should know that it's not true between the two of them. Yes, that's right. They're acting. I mean, yeah.

48:19 · jump to transcript →