Michel Sardou

This concept is particularly prevalent in horror, a genre known for blood and boobs.

Alfred Hitchcock was quoted as saying, I always believe following the advice of the playwright Sardou.

He said, torture the women first.

The trouble today is we don't torture women enough.

Many dramatists have dodged the difficulty of attempting a life-sized portrait of Napoleon by introducing him as a subsidiary figure and depicting only a single aspect of his multifarious personality.

This formula was followed by Sardou in Madame Sans-Gêne.

Readers who remember the performance of this play by Ellen Terry and Sir Henry Irving will recall the fact that Napoleon was intended only as a minor character in the dramatic pattern.

But they will also recall the more impressive fact that when Irving entered and exhibited his studious depiction of Napoleon, he ran away with the play, as actors call the process, and took the stage away without intention from Miss Terry.

But he chose instead to write, year after year, a vehicle for the muse of melodrama, and sold his laurel crown for gate receipts.

If Sardou suffered through playing the sedulous ape to a histrionic artist, it is no less true that the same practice has been advantageous to M. Edmund Rosten.

M. Rosten has shrewdly written for the greatest comedian of the recent generation, and Constant Coquelin was the making of him as a dramatist.

The poet's early pieces, like the Romanesque's, disclosed him as a master of preciosity, exquisitely lyrical, but lacking in the sternest stuff of drama.