lavish productions due to budgetary constraints" (22). Having been advised by the

associate producer at Warner's, Henry Blanke, to makeae every shot count" (qtd. in

Jameson 38), Huston worked hard to tighten the narrative. To Hal Wallis's memo about

the opening sequence being a little slow, for instance, he responded by "shrinking all the

pauses and speeding up all the action .. making Bogart quick and staccato and taking all

the deliberateness out of his action" (qtd. in Behlmer 118). Idling, then, would have been

incompatible with the fast-paced world of noir and with the parsimonious ethos of

Warner Bros.

 Indeed, idling would appear antithetical to the entire Classic Hollywood mode of

filmmaking, which preferred the relentless roll of action to distracting stillness. That

mode, modeled on the linear continuity of the assembly line, operated with the speed and

efficiency that Mussolini claimed for his railroad system. In fact, as Lynne Kirby has

effectively argued, cinema's continuity impulse ran parallel to the forward impulsion of

the railways.4 It was the arrival of a train at a station that caused cinema's earliest

spectators, who feared the train's onward momentum, to rush out of the way. Within less

than a decade, when momentum itself was becoming the norm, a railcar became the site

of a great robbery and, in the process, established the standard for narrative filmmaking.

For while the Lumieres' Arrival of a Train at a Station (1895) marked the beginning of

the movies' long-running relationship with the railroad, it was Edwin S. Porter's film that

discovered how cinematic narrative might parallel the railways' code of continuity.

Having been fascinated with Georges Melies's "trick films," like A Trip to the Moon

(1902), Porter intuited that "'a picture telling a story in continuity form might draw the

customers back to the theaters"' and then set to work in that direction (qtd. in Musser 25).