Word: plot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Despite its phoniness-or perhaps because of it-this is just the sort of plot that appeals to ostentatious writers and directors. They glow with the prospect of putting seven people in a situation that is both temporally and spatially confined, and then developing their characters. The amount of character that can be developed when you have 104 minutes to split up among seven characters is at best small, and it is no wonder that for the most part the big names involved in Executive Suite are propping up card-board people...
...Ronde the French have reduced cinema to its basic ingredient, the seduction scene. Adopted from a play by Arthur Schnitzler, the film replaces plot with ten love affairs, each interlocking to form a circle. Schnitzler's play, like Tom Lehrer's parody of Voltaire, follows the path of love back to its starting point, perhaps more delicately but with much less humor...
Rossini: II Signer Bruschino (Elda Ribetti, Luigi Pontiggia; Milan Philharmonic conducted by Ennio Gerelli; Vox). A delightfully melodious little one-act opera, full of musical fun, the usual incredible plot, and some remarkably attractive singing...
...plot is best summed up by a recurrent phrase in the picture: "The country's alive with Indians." Through this red-man-infested landscape moves Rory Calhoun (delicately described as Marilyn's fiancé), carrying a mining claim won in a card game, and astride a horse stolen from honest Farmer Robert Mitchurn. After Rory, on a raft, come Widower Mitchum, his ten-year-old son (Tommy Rettig) and Actress Monroe. In making the trek, Mitchum wrestles in turn with a mountain lion, a knife-wielding badman, several Indians, and Marilyn. She gives him by far the toughest...
...exciting play. In fact, its main fault lies in the effort Mr. Amfitheatrof has made to achieve excitement. His characters indulge in a good deal too much swearing and beating upon one another--both gems of stock dramaturgy that are below the author's general high plane of plot construction...