Word: plot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Hall listed the four "big lies" which this "hate network" spreads. The charges are 1) "UWF is a communist front," 2) "one world means world communism," 3) "one world means the end of U.S. sovereignty and the scrapping of the constitution," and 4) "the United Nations is a Jewish plot...
...movie's plot does not quite hold all this pageantry together, but De Mille's scripters and actors enter into the thing in the proper flamboyant spirit. Determined to extend a ten-week itinerary into a full season, Charlton Heston, the circus' gruff but devoted manager, promises his reluctant bosses (including John Ringling North himself) to show a profit. He imports Sebastian the Great (Cornel Wilde), a daring high-trapeze artist, thereby queering himself with Aerialist Betty Hutton, who must move out of the center ring. Betty starts a performing feud with Wilde, goads him into...
While Betty warms up to the injured Wilde, a sexy elephant stunt-girl (Gloria Grahame) moves in on the eligible Heston. A jealous Prussian elephant trainer (Lyle Bettger), foiled by Heston when trying to plant an elephant's foot on Gloria's pretty face, joins a plot to halt the circus train and rob the cashier's car. He causes a gargantuan train wreck-for which De Mille demolished full-sized trains (TIME, May 7). The wreck not only awakens Betty's love for Heston and her organizing genius in effecting the circus's comeback...
Weissberg's arrest was part of the "Great Purge" that followed the first Moscow trials. The G.P.U. gave him a wide choice of crimes to "confess," but their highest hope was that he would admit to organizing a plot to murder Stalin. They were deeply offended when Weissberg not only resisted admitting this, but insisted that he was also innocent of such lesser delinquencies as planning to blow up the Kharkov tractor works, or of building a "counterrevolutionary, Trotskyist, fascist, terrorist, diversionist and espionage organization ... on the territory of the Soviet Union...
...until his head was splitting and his splayed buttocks a mass of burning pulp. After a week of this, Weissberg "confessed"-a ticklish job, because his "crimes" had to dovetail exactly both into the "confessions" of his "accomplices" (i.e., his arrested friends who had incriminated him) and the overall plot requirements laid down by G.P.U. planners...