Crisis probe lacks Pecora edge

By Julian Delasantellis

During the darkest days of the Great Depression of the 1930s, businessmen knew that they had to go the extra mile to separate customers from their money. For the movie-theater owner, this frequently involved presenting substantially more entertainment and information than just the feature film attraction.

One of these might be what came to be known as the "cliffhanger", basically, a 10-20 minute segment of an adventure/science fiction film, one that began with a resolution of the protagonist's crisis from the previous week, and ended with him getting into another one (as in, hanging off a cliff) that would hold the audience's attention and interest until the following week.