(Continuity: 2 the maintenance of continuous action and self-consistent detail in the various scenes of a movie or broadcast – From IRSBD’s computer’s dictionary application)…

1950. A dark street in a big town, San Francisco or maybe Honolulu. A 1949 Ford convertible cruises slowly through the empty streets, it’s headlights glowing faintly in the murky night.

(This scene is shot day for night, or possibly it’s opposite.)

Although it hasn’t been raining, the streets are wet.

We hear a shot.

Cut to a figure in an alleyway. He slumps, a small, black revolver falls from his bleeding hand and clatters on the cobblestones at his feet. The figure stumbles out of the shadows and begins to run down the street. We see his running feet in a close-up. He’s wearing brown shoes. The film is shot, however, in black and white. His shoes therefore appear to be black or gray, as does the occasional drop of bright red blood on the pavement. We watch his feet as he runs through the crowds of afternoon shoppers and working people, who are shod in footwear of various kinds and colors. There’s a full moon overhead.

Cut to the Ford. It has a whitewall tire on the left front and the hubcap is missing from the left rear wheel. Although it’s raining, the convertible’s top is down. The driver is a big, beautiful, blond with long red hair. She’s smoking a cigar. There’s a man in the trunk. The car is racing along a city street, pursued by lion.

Cut to a nightclub interior. Leggy dancers are performing, dressed as kitchen utensils. A singer appears in a sequined gown, form-fitting and two sizes too large. She puts on horn-rimmed glasses, through which she squints at a piece of notebook paper containing song lyrics. She begins to sing:

“What is this thing, called lungs…” she warbles.

The camera pulls back and pans left, stops, pans right, past the singer again and past a table at which Frank Trite, a private investigator with a taste for chocolate martinis, sits, glaring at a member of the band. The camera returns to him and zooms in slowly to his left eye, then spins around to reveal the object of his glaring, a saxophone player in the first row, playing slightly out of tune. Trite fingers the .45 in it’s holster inside his fancy checked sports-coat.

The singer approaches his table and looks directly at Trite as she continues to sing.

“I saw you there,
one wonderful day.
My internal organs were
In complete disarray…”

A large clock on the wall of the club shows the time: 3 am. Closing-time.

Cut to the Ford, now a 1953 model. The whitewall tire has disappeared and a hubcap is visible on the rear wheel. The top is up, although the rain has stopped and it’s a beautiful sunshiny day. The car stops at what appears to be the exterior of the nightclub. A man gets out of the trunk and runs inside, followed by the lion. The woman in the car is now a brunette. She adjusts the inside rear-view mirror while she re-applies her fire-engine-red lipstick. We hear sirens approaching in the distance.

In the mirror, she sees the bleeding man lurching toward her along the sidewalk. We hardly recognize the man, who is now played by different actor. He falls and then crawls toward the car, which has changed again and is now a bright yellow 1947 Packard. The bleeding man reaches the car and jumps into the trunk after shouting at the beautiful woman, “Follow that cab!”

A cab pulls up in front of the Packard. The lion is driving. He leans out of the drivers’ side window and looks back at the Packard. “Where to?” he asks the woman.

Cut to the inside of the nightclub. The clock on the wall unaccountably reads 11:45, The man from the Ford’s trunk is now sitting at Trite’s table, along with the singer, who is blind drunk. The place has cleared out. The band is packing up.

“It’s quiet in here.” Says Trite.

“TOO quiet!” yells the band, at the top of their lungs.

The sirens outside grow louder.

Everyone at Trite’s table suddenly gets up and races out of the room. They all jump into the cab outside. The band comes running out and leaps into the Packard. They begin playing “Nearer My God To Thee” as the woman, blonde again, slams the car into gear and stomps on the accelerator. She swerves the big car around the cab and speeds away. Several police cars race by the cab in pursuit. Trite puts his gun to the lion’s head. “Drive!”, he says.

Cut to the chase.

The End.