Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Since there is virtually no check on speculators, denudations occur that would turn an American slumlord's hair white with envy. An example: one night some trucks drove up to a little 13th century church standing on a valuable plot of land in the middle of Salerno. The drivers attached chains to the frail walls and then pulled away. The building simply collapsed. There was some mild protest from the Bishop of Salerno, but, as Journalist Sorrentino acidly recounted, "the land where now you can see a hideous new building was worth, and fetched...
...woman psychiatrist (Lovelady Powell), but she isn't much help, being apparently as puzzled about him as the rest of us. "I never understood why you went to live in the East Village when you came back from Tangier," she says, a remark which slightly advances the plot, but not the analysis...
Suffice it to say that one of the twins (the other?) turns out to be monstrously, homicidally evil, and that Tryon and Mulligan pull off a neat plot twist midway in the action. It's diverting enough, but still essentially a trick. What is badly needed is some reason for the twins' rampaging villainy, some suggestion of why they should be so keen on frightening old ladies to death and carrying human fingers around in a Prince Albert tobacco can. Instead, all we get is a sleight-of-hand...
...Legend of Nigger Charley is not much of an improvement. The plot comes more or less out of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, minus three. Charley is a freed slave who rides through the Southwest righting wrongs with the help of three companions. At one point, shortly after dispatching a gang of drunken louts in a saloon set-to, they help a white homesteader fight off the attacks of a band of marauding outlaws. Charley develops a yen for the homesteader's half-breed wife, portrayed by a comely young actress named Tricia O'Neill, who represents...
Died. Alexander Korneichuk, 66, playwright-politician who became one of the Soviet Union's most prominent literary loyalists; in Kiev. Because of his skill in blending party line with plot, Korneichuk won five Stalin Prizes and a number of political appointments during the 1930s and '40s. After Stalin's death, he allied himself with Nikita Khrushchev and in 1955 attacked the fallen secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria, in a play called Wings. It marked the start of Khrushchev's public assault on Stalinism. Korneichuk also survived Khrushchev's ouster, serving the present regime...