There was a sound of revelry by night,
And Belgium’s capital had gathered then
Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright
The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men.
A thousand hearts beat happily; and when
Music arose with its voluptuous swell,
Soft eyes looked love to eyes which spake again,
And all went merry as a marriage bell;
But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell!

~ Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” Canto III, verse XXI

I don’t know how old I was when I first read that poem, but I know that the whole “Eve of Waterloo” passage has had a strong hold on my imagination ever since. When I was a teenager it was a major inspiration for scenes in a Civil War epic that never actually ended up getting written (with Culpeper and Brandy Station standing in for Brussels and Waterloo). Something about its image of gaiety interrupted by the threat of danger, romance threatened with impending doom, evokes a sense of drama and poignancy that’s hard to summarize. (Do read the whole passage; it’s well worth it.) And eventually, this passage also helped me to recognize a plot device—perhaps something that could even be called a trope—that I’d absently noted recurring across the works of one particular film director: what I’ve come to call the Interrupted Party.

Classic-movie enthusiasts probably know this: if there is a dinner, dance or party in a John Ford film, chances are one of two things will happen: (A) a serenade, or (B) an interruption, in the form of a battle, bad news, or an unexpected arrival. Wee Willie Winkie, The Searchers, Wagon Master, Drums Along the Mohawk: one interruption apiece. They Were Expendable: one serenade and one interruption. Fort Apache: one serenade and two interruptions (I think that might be the record). Rio Grande: two serenades and two incidents that feel like interruptions, even though they technically take place after the party’s over and everyone’s gone home. The Grapes of Wrath has an attempted interruption; How Green Was My Valley a couple of quasi-interruptions (an unexpected guest arriving at one party, an argument among the guests at another). If a punch thrown at a wedding reception counts as an interruption, The Quiet Man has one too.

At about this point, I started getting the feeling that somebody thought this was a good idea.

If you think about it a little more you realize this is a recurring device across films and stories in general; Ford films just seemed to refine it into a kind of art. For a famous non-Ford example, take the Twelve Oaks barbecue in Gone With the Wind, which ends with the men pouring out of the house to join the army at news of the Civil War’s beginning. Or the serenity of Lady Ludlow’s garden party in Cranford shattered by the news that THE RAILROAD IS COMING. B-Western scriptwriters caught onto it too: off the top of my head, I can think of at least twenty B-Westerns where a celebration of some kind is interrupted by a hold-up, bank robbery, cattle-rustling, horse-theft, fistfight, or some other knavery. B-Western screenwriting is plot scraped down to its barest framework, free of additional layers like character development, motivation or emotion (or at least only utilizes them in a superficial degree). But you can still build excitement and humor off that framework, which is what the best examples of the genre do well. And the writers knew the value of an interrupted party.

So I started considering: what are the benefits to a story? I came up with a couple ideas of my own. First, a celebration of some kind gathers all or most of your story’s cast together in one place. Whatever the interruption is, everyone is there to learn of it, react to it, maybe discuss it; you can choose anyone you like to take part in the reaction or discussion. If it’s an important event, it’s a catalyst for everybody.

Second—and I think this is more important—it creates a dramatic mood shift. It emphasizes the significance, and possibly the wrongness, of whatever is interrupting. It’s a bit like what P.D. James observed in Talking About Detective Fiction (I am paraphrasing dramatically here), that one body in a country library automatically makes the crime more shocking than a dozen crimes in a big-city alleyway—because it’s incongruous, it’s out of place. Isn’t it more of a shock to have a battle or bad news put an abrupt end to gaiety than to have it come when everyone is already sobered or on edge with expecting it?

I wonder in which medium it’s easier to create the necessary atmosphere of gaiety, and then pull off that mood shift—fiction or film? I honestly think it can be done in either, though it may be a little more obvious and require less effort in film. But let’s not forget that Byron produced that breathtaking original example with simply words on paper.

It was a minor epiphany to realize that I’d actually been using this device myself without even trying—the unpublished novel I was working on at the time I made these observations had a perfect example of an Interrupted Party right smack in the middle of it. Land of Hills and Valleys also features an absolutely classic Interrupted Party as the climax to Part I, which, if my memory serves me right, dates back to the original draft of the story around thirteen years ago. And to bring things full circle, I actually used lines from “The Eve of Waterloo” as the chapter epigraph, something I’d been longing to do for years. I’m still tickled by the way they fit every time I look at the page.

What are your favorite examples of an interrupted party in fiction or film? If you’re a writer, have you written this kind of scene yourself?

This is a slightly revised version of a post originally from 2015.