Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Senators wanted to know whether Kennedy could have learned about the plot from Judy...
...about gangland activities (TIME, June 30). But committee members interrogated Roselli, who now spends most of his time fighting the Government's efforts to deport him, and committee lawyers questioned Mrs. Exner. They turned up no evidence to contradict her claim that she had never known about the plot to kill Castro. Nor were they able to challenge her statement that she had never told Kennedy about her mobster friends...
This is a perfectly acceptable kind of hero, and Belmondo plays his character straight and tough, but if this is the way we are supposed to see Le Tellier, certain long sequences in the film become irrelevant and distracting. The main plot line involves Le Tellier's search for a maniacal killer who thinks it his duty to punish women of "loose moral." Another, unrelated, killer keeps popping up at odd moments; we learn that he had repeatedly outsmarted Le Tellier in the past and that he had almost cost the cop his job because of uncertainty concerning the death...
...material on killer number two does absolutely nothing to further the real plot of The Night Caller. It would still be useful if it gave us additional insights into the character of Le Tellier, but all it does is emphasize the already established fact that the cop is tough, singleminded and unorthodox. Verneuil pretends to offer psychological amplification, but draws back and gives the same superficial information about his hero. The director does not seem to know what makes Le Tellier tick, or at any rate, he is not sharing his information with...
...material on the secondary killer does provide an excuse for additional chase sequences and shoot-outs, but it would have been easy enough to incorporate them into the main plot. Action thrillers need not be as sophisticated or insightful as psychological thrillers, but they must be tightly structured to keep us in suspense about the outcome of the primary plot. The extraneous sequences on the killer from the past break the tension of the main manhunt. As a result, we lose most of our interest in the denouement...