Word: plot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...plot concerns two detectives assigned to guard Joan at a seaside hotel during her 24-hour release from the penitentiary in order to give information to the district attorney about her recently murdered gangster lover. Both detectives are on the gangsters' payroll, but one of them (Lloyd Bridges) falls in love with the girl. The other (James Gregory) is determined to kill her. With this suspenseful situation established in the first five minutes, Playwright Kantor then all but ignores it until the final curtain when the relatively good detective disarms the completely bad one in a technically skillful stage...
There is, accordingly, the classic problem of how to get rid of a corpse; and thereafter, bites of U.N. thinking are washed down with draughts of unabashed theater. Only at the end do plot and theme rather floridly meet-when the Russian delegate, despite his Communist conditioning, shows a human spark. That human spark, deep inside even Communists, is what Delegate Cornell feels can eventually save the world...
...Plot That Failed. Out of favor with President Hindenburg, Hans von Seeckt finally gave way, in 1926, to another general, sly Kurt von Schleicher. Under Schleicher, the army was not above, but in, politics. Vain, unscrupulous, he schemed incessantly behind the republic's back. Worst of all, he let Hitler's private army of brown shirts grow to a scrap-happy, unmanageable...
...lifted a paw against him. When a bomb was finally exploded in the Führer's presence in July 1944, he was stunned and his famed forelock was set alight, but he lived to revel in the torture deaths of many of the men who made the plot. So dear to Hitler's baleful eye was the sight of a German general slowly strangling on a slim cord at the end of a meathook that he had a film of the hangings run off for his benefit...
Author Dahl is an adroit craftsman who knows how to make the unlikely seem probable. He builds long bridges of suspense, then skillfully carries his stories across to his predetermined points. It is not surprising, in view of his qualities, that he has been overpraised. Long on plot, short on character, his stories extract their effectiveness from anecdotal gimmicks and surprise endings. One test of a fine story is its rereadability, and this, naturally, is a test that few of these modern O. Henry tales can meet...