The urge to skip straight to the good stuff is nothing new. Some folks can’t read a murder mystery without flipping to the back of the book to discover “whodunit.” And if you know someone with the gift of gab, you might feel the urge to stop them in the middle of a rant and say, “Cut to the chase!”
This idiomatic phrase means “to go directly to the important part of a story, argument, or discussion.” In other words, it means skipping the small talk and getting to the action, which is precisely where the phrase’s origin lies.
“Cut to the chase” dates to early 20th-century silent films — especially those with chase scenes. Think of the train pursuit in Buster Keaton’s The General (1926), renowned for its elaborate real-life train crash. During this era, chase scenes were the most exciting part of the plot, but movies were structured so that they came at the very end, offering an action scene and a resolution all in one. As a result, audiences were sometimes bored at the beginning of the movie.
Projectionists took note of their audience’s mood. If the crowd seemed disinterested, the middle reels were skipped, cutting straight to the chase scene. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this phrase first appeared in film industry lingo during the late 1920s, around the time The General debuted.
However, the idiom took some time to enter mainstream slang, appearing (possibly for the first time) in print in Frank Scully’s novel Cross My Heart (1955): “I am the sort who wants to ‘cut to the chase.’ As far as I’m concerned, we can read the instructions later.” A century after its genesis, the idiom endures. In 1995, it appeared again alongside Keaton’s work, this time in the title of his biography, Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase, a nod to the industry that gave rise to this timeless expression.
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