Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...same being. Anthony stands for Art untrammeled by mundane affairs; Brown for the etiolated Babbittry of Commerce. But Dion is himself divided, his first name standing for Dionysius, the creative-erotic life force, and his last name Anthony for "a saint in the desert, exorcising a demon." In plot terms, Anthony goes to work for Brown and loses his creative urge and his life. But to secure Anthony's widow (Catherine Helmond) Brown must don Anthony's mask to appropriate Anthony's passion. Thus a transfer of identities is completed. Finally, each character's mask...
Through his ingenious director, Frank Dunlop, and a fine ensemble of actors, Osborne has gone McLuhan and made the theater his message. Plot, structure, story-even that Osborne speciality, the long brilliant speech-all gone. Instead, we have half a dozen players on a sparse stage, and a "chairman," who opens the proceedings with a discussion of the printed program. Be fore long, the characters are asking each other, and the audience, what the hell they're doing there. A beer-swilling football fan issues periodic razzberries from the balcony, while from a front-row seat in the stalls...
...plot turns on an invasion from the troubled north by strange blacks equipped with European weapons and a shabby Asian brand of revolution. Francois, a loyal Bushman friend and the pretty 13-year-old daughter of a neighboring rancher escape the massacre by taking refuge in a cave, which Francois has stocked with provisions. There is a strong note of never-never to the story, and while the time apparently is the late 1950s, the impression persists that the author really is saying farewell to his own childhood in Africa decades before...
...golden age, as a line in the script defines it, was "when every Cabinet Minister had a thriller by his bedside, and all the detectives were titled." To fully enjoy Sleuth, it is necessary to have an indulgent affection for this minor literary tradition. Shaffer is shrewd with a plot turn and smooth with breezy characterization. But he asks us, as did Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie or any other reigning monarch of the golden age, to accept too much and think too little...
...penny arcade. Milo Tindle (Michael Caine), a London hairdresser whose parents were Italian and-worse yet-Jewish, is the lover of Wyke's estranged wife. He comes by Wyke's stately home one afternoon to discuss a divorce. Wyke instead presses him into an intricate plot to defraud an insurance company. Shaffer would have us believe that one man. wanting another's wife, could easily be persuaded to dress up in a clown's outfit and stumble about, under the husband's wry supervision, trying to blow up a safe and remove the jewelry...