Cut to the chase!!!
Martin Doyle
THERE’S nothing like a horn in your ear to get your heart pumping.
That goes without saying. But where does all the excitement of running and hunting come from? For me, it started in my childhood when we used to go on holiday up to the King Country. While there, we’d occasionally go to nighttime movies at the old fleapit down the road.
Most of them were cowboy films like The Black Skull and the climax, what we lived for, was when all the la-di-da dialogue ended and the “chase” began. Someone would always be chasing someone and it was always with the express intention of doing them a lot of harm. Sometimes a Sheriff would be right on the tail of some unshaved varmint, or an Apache would be trying to plug an arrow into the back of some galloping ham.
Always we’d be thinking “will he catch him?”, “will he get away?” (and it was always a “he”). And just for fun, they’d sometimes chase after THINGS, like a racing train or a stagecoach at full-whip. Even the passengers got in on the act, firing shots from the windows and always managing to pick off two or three disposable extras on horseback.
And moviemakers aren’t stupid. They know what people want. That’s why some Hollywood director about 80 years ago chopped several pages of useless verbiage out of the script and wrote in a clear new direction: “CUT TO THE CHASE!” i.e. drop the garbage and let the (real) action begin! That’s celluloid for you.
But outside again in the chill air of normal reality, it’s a different story (or needs to be). Over the past six months alone, there have been dozens of crashes and dozens of injuries as a result of police car chases. Worst of all, nine (or is it 10 now?) young drivers have died in the wreckage. It’s a hard one to sort out. I think it’s time the crime scene was sealed off with a new type of police tape marked “There’s a lesson to be learned here”.
You don’t see too many high-speed chases round Wellington streets. It could be that our overfed desk-pushers just don’t ‘do’ adrenalin, but I also put it down to our law-abiding “youf”, and the discreet (and very wise) style of our constables. Softly, softly, catchee monkey. They know there’s always a tomorrow and in little ol’ New Zealand, you can run but you can’t hide. Also, any boy-racer crashing in Lambton Quay would be scared shitless that the ever-smiling Judith Collins would wander down from the Beehive and bite his head off with her bare teeth, and crush his car flat (before swarming Parking Wardens did him for incorrect parking and an expired warrant).
But I digress. The key reason for police to abandon these chases is human: a living boy-racer is preferable to a dead boy-racer. Mark a new note in the script: CUT THE CHASE!
That goes without saying. But where does all the excitement of running and hunting come from? For me, it started in my childhood when we used to go on holiday up to the King Country. While there, we’d occasionally go to nighttime movies at the old fleapit down the road.
Most of them were cowboy films like The Black Skull and the climax, what we lived for, was when all the la-di-da dialogue ended and the “chase” began. Someone would always be chasing someone and it was always with the express intention of doing them a lot of harm. Sometimes a Sheriff would be right on the tail of some unshaved varmint, or an Apache would be trying to plug an arrow into the back of some galloping ham.
Always we’d be thinking “will he catch him?”, “will he get away?” (and it was always a “he”). And just for fun, they’d sometimes chase after THINGS, like a racing train or a stagecoach at full-whip. Even the passengers got in on the act, firing shots from the windows and always managing to pick off two or three disposable extras on horseback.
And moviemakers aren’t stupid. They know what people want. That’s why some Hollywood director about 80 years ago chopped several pages of useless verbiage out of the script and wrote in a clear new direction: “CUT TO THE CHASE!” i.e. drop the garbage and let the (real) action begin! That’s celluloid for you.
But outside again in the chill air of normal reality, it’s a different story (or needs to be). Over the past six months alone, there have been dozens of crashes and dozens of injuries as a result of police car chases. Worst of all, nine (or is it 10 now?) young drivers have died in the wreckage. It’s a hard one to sort out. I think it’s time the crime scene was sealed off with a new type of police tape marked “There’s a lesson to be learned here”.
You don’t see too many high-speed chases round Wellington streets. It could be that our overfed desk-pushers just don’t ‘do’ adrenalin, but I also put it down to our law-abiding “youf”, and the discreet (and very wise) style of our constables. Softly, softly, catchee monkey. They know there’s always a tomorrow and in little ol’ New Zealand, you can run but you can’t hide. Also, any boy-racer crashing in Lambton Quay would be scared shitless that the ever-smiling Judith Collins would wander down from the Beehive and bite his head off with her bare teeth, and crush his car flat (before swarming Parking Wardens did him for incorrect parking and an expired warrant).
But I digress. The key reason for police to abandon these chases is human: a living boy-racer is preferable to a dead boy-racer. Mark a new note in the script: CUT THE CHASE!
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