Word: plot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Billy Budd" is built around an abstract moral theme and as such it differs greatly from the average Broadway plot-dominated production. The average American audience considers "Billy Budd" hard work. Hence its mixed reception on Broadway. The backers are counting on the intelligentsia, among whom the Brattle playgoers like to consider themselves, for the appreciation and financial support the production needs. After Tuesday's opening, both of these necessities seemed assured...
...plot itself is simple. It concerns a clash between Billy Budd, an impressed sailor in the frigate days of the British navy who represents extreme good, and evil John Claggart, master at arms. Billy seeks the friendship of the master of arms, and Claggart seeks Billy's destruction. Between them stands Captain Edward Vere, who, alone of the three can recognize both good and evil. When Billy hits and accidentally kills Claggart, it is Vere who must judge him. Billy has broken "the compromise between good and evil," and order must be restored. Law triumphs over justice and the Captain...
Though the producers have changed the locale, period and much of the plot, it is still the amusing story of a pair of elegant swindlers preying on a group of social snobs who turn out to be just as fraudulent, in their own way, as the crooks. The culprits team up in Victorian London, where one is the perfect lady's maid (Greer Garson), the other a scampish, penniless aristocrat (Michael Wilding). Moving on to gullible San Francisco, where wealthy climbers are eager to fawn on English nobility, the maid passes for a marchioness and the blue blood...
...idea. Bridges is an ex-G.I. who has served time for black-marketeering and goes back to dig up his loot. The site is a G.I. cemetery, and the nearby town is full of schemers trying to trip Bridges up for reasons of their own. They thicken the plot with so much intrigue that it curdles into the kind of confusion best followed with a score card listing names and numbers of all the actors...
...plot, The Dividing Stream adds up to little more than an emotional tempest in a cracked teacup. Atmospherically, English Novelist Francis King, 28, does better. In dozens of pungent little Florentine sketches, ranging from cynical policemen to bent-double washerwomen, he evokes the passion and poverty of the people. Most memorable: two scrubby street urchins who think and move with an artless, pagan ease which suggests that the good life, and not a twisted packet of "problems," is man's rightful heritage...