Word: plot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...explanation, left Westerners to wonder what had happened to ex-Chief of Staff Shtemenko. Only last month he was in the news: he was one of the five high Soviet military figures said by the Kremlin to have been saved from slow murder in the Kremlin "doctors' plot...
...plot is slight and charming. The ingenuous offspring of a proud line of cocottes, Gigi shocks here family by holding out for a proposal rather than a proposition. From the irony of conventional immorality, the play draws its humour, most appealing in the less hurried scene in which Gigi learns that a carat is mineral, not vegetable. With cluttered parlor and gilt boudoir, hour-glass corsets and knowing looks, the play elegantly recreates Paris...
...remnants of Pushkin's plot are recognizable. The action takes place in old St. Petersburg, where a power hungry young officer slyly schemes to obtain the secret of success at faro from the wizened old countess (who sold her soul to get it). Anton Walbrook, who doesn't need a sound track, plays the officer; the rest of the cast are competent English actors, quite at home in their nineteenth century dress...
This combination cantata, symphony, and opera splits into three long movements. There are a few dull passages, but most of its 120 minutes brim over with intense emotion. After an orchestral introduction, a choral recitative marks out the plot, and the first movement ends with what seems to be a rather static version of the famous balcony scene. The second movement has the familiar "Queen Maud Scherzo" and the final section describes the death of the lovers, and the reconciliation of the warring houses...
...plot is essentially uncomplicated: a little girl, having seen her parents machine-gunned to death by a German plane as they fled across France in 1940, becomes obsessed with ideas of death and burial. She and a boy from the family with whom she takes refuge build a cemetery for animals in an old mill, and steal crosses from local graves to mark the resting places of dead animals. Eventually they are found out, and their little game comes...