Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...more objective viewpoint than Mario Puzo, and shown what really happens to the middlemen and junked-up patrons of the Mob's cathouses and clipjoints. But the detailing of inner Mafla workings is vivid and accurate, as is--more importantly-- the Corleone family chronicle. This comes less from plot incident than from the perfect characterizations of Brando's Godfather, and At Pacino, James Caan, and Robert Duvall as his natural and adopted sons. Francis Ford Coppola has directed with a line enough eye to make all the connections between them apparent: Gordon Willis's septa-tinged photography and Nino Rota...
...Neil Simon script is blessedly free of the frenetic banter of his plays. The plot, taken from Bruce Jay Friedman's short story, A Change of Plan, is a bright comic idea: a man on his honeymoon falls in love with another woman. Lenny Cantrow (Charles Grodin), a sporting goods salesman in New York, marries a sweetly vacuous girl named Lila Kolodny (Jeannie Berlin). The wedding is small, echt New York Jewish, with folding chairs in a rented hotel room and piped-in music featuring a recognizable and wildly inappropriate soft-drink jingle...
Most slickly scripted and produced special: the Republican National Convention in Miami, whose predictable plot line made it even more boring than its Democratic competition...
...mobile from the great days of Congressman Hodge, an upright late 19th century liberal with a smile that could make the corn grow and the voters turn out at the polls. Taggert Hodge's search for vengeance triggers the series of jailbreaks, murders and accidents that pass for plot and which, like Faulkner, Gardner feeds his public in small chunks to keep them turning pages. What matters, of course, are the Hodges themselves, whose various minds and lives Gardner inhabits for hours, days and years until, when the book is at its best, the reader breathes in their world...
...niceties of style and characterization; by contrast, a better writer "won't be bothered with the coolie labor of breaking down unbreakable alibis." Shaffer tries to escape this dilemma by concentrating first on the personal, then the class bitterness between Wyke and Tindle, but the intricacies of his plot hem him in; the bitterness, instead of a motive, seems like an excuse. Characters remain incidental to the contortions of plot...