Word: plot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...drifted to New Orleans, got involved in a plot to take over part of the western Territories, was tried for treason, acquitted, and exiled himself to London, Sweden, Germany and France, where he lived by his wits and off his women...
...written in Gallic terms, i.e., the playwright never reveals whom he is rooting for. This has proved dismaying to Broadway audiences in the past because, though relishing a good fight between right and wrong, U.S. playgoers prefer to know which is which. Opposed in the turn-of-the-century plot are Eli Wallach, a young man top-heavy with virtue, and his wife Julie Harris, who cannot see why he must do everything the hard way when the easy way is so much more fun. Called up for military service, Wallach nobly refuses to seek deferment, even though it means...
...Michael Kanin) uses a comic framework as neat and narrow as a coffin. Written by a pair of playwrights who are married, it concerns a pair who are divorced (after two Broadway failures). In a freak legal wrangle, because they have both thought up a play with the same plot, they get a court order to write it together. Propinquity makes hearts grow fonder, and they decide, if the new play clicks, to remarry. Then they decide that love outweighs success. and to remarry whatever happens...
...spectator rather than in action of the characters. The Confidential Clerk in this respect, depends even more on the symbolic clash of ideas than did The Cocktail Party. Eliot fashioned his earlier play with far better poetry, injected sporadic ironies and amusing lines, and allowed his non-cognitive audience plot and interrelationships which could be enjoyed on many different levels. The Confidential Clerk is less tolerant of its audience. Perched, in essence, high above the actual stage, it expects one to constantly interpret and mold Eliot's continuity out of what is, on first glance, obscure. In other words...
...Director Julien Duvivier lets his camera dwell at length upon the filth and vice of the Casbah. He delights in picturing squalid, old women sitting in doorways or sunning themselves upon the endless steps and terraces of the native quarter. Occasionally, however, the emotional implications of both setting and plot become cloying. A scene in which a fat hag tearfully recalls her past success on the stage turns maudlin, while the murder of an informer has all the qualities of an old time serial...