Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Directed by John Frankenheimer from a George Azerrod script. It's a Cold War fantary which mocks both the Left and Right sides of the Iron and Bamboo curtains(remember them?) Lawrence Harvey is a Korean War brainwashed by Red Chinese is become an assassin-on-request. But the plot is not as it seems, for the actual conspiracy which controls him is a union of yellow and white Leninist`s with McCarthyites. Frank Sinatra plays the good guy in the film, an Army buddy of Harvey's who senses something's wrong. The foreign agents' dialogue is amusingly epigrammatic...
...BANAL AS ALL this must surely sound, there is no reason for it to appear any more or less hopeless than any other Truffaut plot. Like others it is simple; like others it is conventional. But where formerly Truffaut could somehow turn the seemingly uninteresting into the surprisingly charming, Two English Girls turns out to be quite as vapid as you would expect...
...myth from which he borrowed. Here they find the king a primitive hero who lifts one evil spell-the Sphinx's-only to bring down a worse spell by violating the ultimate taboo: incest. On the Guthrie stage, dark as the predawn of civilization, this ritual circle of plot is made to stand out like an elemental curse: by solving its riddle,* Oedipus destroys the Sphinx; by failing to solve soon enough the mystery of his own identity-whose son he is-Oedipus destroys himself...
...plot is just the kind of gangster genealogy that, as they say, names names (Genovese, Anastasia, Profaci, Luciano), although the movie actually has less relation to the underworld history of the past four decades than to old Edward G. Robinson bloodlettings on the Warner Brothers back lot. In the traditional Robinson role of the chairman of the thugs is Joseph Wiseman, a usually reliable actor who has mysteriously decided to portray the Sicilian overlord Salvatore Maranzano in an accent that is pure Transylvanian. Maranzano divides the gangs all over the country into families, then stands back and watches...
Like most Ozu films. "Tokyo Story" is about the increasing contrasts between old and new Japan. And like all Ozu films, the plot is so plain, despite its variety of psychological and emotional levels, that it can be summarized as an anecdote. An old couple leave their home in the port-town of Shimonoseki their children in Tokyo. But there they are intruders in spite of a fond reception, there is no place for them in their children's homes, and they are sent away to vacation at some hot springs resort. The boisterous carryings-on of young people drive...