Word: plot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...world-shaking. Its first and last ten minutes are a little wordy and more than a little slow, and many murder yarns have displayed more striking situations or original twists or hair-raising climaxes. But few recent ones have been so consistently competent. In terms of plot twists & turns, Mr. Knott always refills the audience's glass before it is quite empty; and in view of the danger of leaving fingerprints, his touch is consistently light. He clearly realizes that the author of a successful murder yarn has to think of almost as many things as the author...
Kansas City Confidential (Edward Small; United Artists) combines a "perfect crime" plot with some fair-to-middling moviemaking. An ex-cop (Preston Foster), having engineered what appears to be a foolproof million-dollar bank robbery in Kansas City, takes off for Guatemala with the loot. In the sleepy Central American town, things seem to be even busier than in Kansas City. Foster must cope not only with his accomplices, but also with an ex-con (John Payne) who has been roughed up by the police as a suspect, and who has taken it upon himself to run down the real...
After a few brawls and beatings, both justice and love emerge triumphant. Obviously, the "confidential" of the title does not refer to the picture's plot, which is a very model of transparency...
...Department's equipment also shows the strains of a tiny budget. One recording machine, for example, has been operating since 1938. He himself must build another valuable piece of equipment, a model of a stage, which dramatic groups can use to plot their performance sets, and all he has to spend on it (after taking out of his budgetary allotment the other costs of his work) is five dollars...
...with a terse and inscrutable paragraph about a dead leopard atop a snow-clad African mountain. That paragraph stopped 20th Century Fox dead in its tracks. Faced with the problem of going along with an essentially plotless and often unfathomable character study or scrapping it for a more conventional plot, 20th Century screenwriter solved it by choosing neither and writing in a mass of extras and animals instead. The result is a spectacular mudflat of a film, neither good Hemingway nor good...