Word: plot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Speaking at Colchester, Britain's Secretary for War John Strachey called the Schuman Plan "this plot," and attacked the coal-steel authority as "an irresponsible international body free from all democratic control." In the House of Commons, Winston Churchill demanded an explanation of this inflammatory speech. Harassed Prime Minister Attlee tried to defend Strachey, ended by saying himself that it was "perfectly fair" to say the Schuman Plan would put very wide powers "into the hands of an irresponsible authority...
...climbers: a warmhearted Italian girl (Valli), a war-weary American (Glenn Ford), an unreconstructed Nazi (Lloyd Bridges), a decadent Frenchman (Claude Rains), a philosophical Englishman (Sir Cedric Hardwicke), a dutiful Swiss (Oscar Homolka). Before the peak comes into sight, they revert pretty much to national typecasting, and the plot maneuvers them to illustrate some simple homilies (e.g., Love conquers all; United we stand, divided we fall...
With the groundwork laid for schizophrenia, or at feast amnesia, the plot switches to Gaslight: Claudette, it turns out, is the victim of an elaborate frame-up. After using a lot of fancy psychiatric jargon in analyzing the heroine's condition, the script finally reveals the villain as melodrama's oldfashioned "mad fiend." Still unsolved: Who framed Actress Colbert into the role...
...took up his duties as a hard-working civil servant in the Post Office. When he had written enough for one book, he simply wrapped up the loose ends as best he could, reached for another sheet of paper and began the next. But in Orley Farm, the plot of which was so dear to his heart, he seems for once to have figured out the whole long run in advance...
Trollope's dovetailing of all this material into a single major plot of slowly mounting drama is an awesome feat. More typically Trollopian are his incidental, illuminating comments on the normal and everyday: on a country squire ("He endeavored to enable his tenants and laborers to live"); of British hotel coffee ("An unlimited supply of lukewarm water poured over an infinitesimal proportion of chicory"). Trollope's unaccustomed passion for plot is no substitute for more such salty asides, dry touches of humor, and lore of human kind...