Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This imbalance of powers is not the result of a deliberate plot conducted by power-happy Presidents. It more or less just happened helped along by circumstance. Named the Commander in Chief of the armed forces by the Constitution, partly to ensure civilian control of the military, the President has always had the power to act quickly when he needed to. Congress, a deliberative body, moves more slowly and cautiously. From Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase to Johnson's dispatch of troops to Viet Nam, with rare exceptions the President has taken the lead in foreign and military policy...
...begins Yojimbo plot source of A Fistful of Dollars and one of the world's classic "westerns." It's a Japanese movie but contains many elements familiar to the fan of the American horse opera. There is the wandering, homeless hero, the isolated town being destroyed by rival factions, a beautiful woman in distress and finally, a showdown--Japanese style. However, Yojimbo goes beyond all this and so avoids the mediocrity of a morass of cliches. Akira Kurosawa, the director, who focused world attention on Japanese cinema with Rashoman and Seven Samurai, succeeds in Yojimbo without resorting to either didacticism...
...preoccupied with curing her son's problem with a dose of mineral oil, which the boy refuses to take. She manages, with her son's help, to destroy Follavoine's business with M. Chouilloux, the war ministry representative who comes to lunch. Looked at in a serious light, the plot alternates between the ridiculous and the grotesque. But by using small incidents as levers to move emotions. Feydeau manages to make the whole thing hang together and progress coherently. It possesses a certain illogical consistency even if it is not altogether plausible...
...middle-aged lawyer is unable to consummate his second marriage to a skittish child-wife--who has meanwhile fallen in love with the lawyer's church-studying stepson. At a house party which the three other love pairs attend also, the wife and the stepson, by a variety of plot and thematic clevernesses, end up in the same bed. The young couple make their exit in the lawyer's carriage, while he looks on and does nothing. The wife's virginal white veil flutters to the ground in the grey light of early dawn, and the lawyer lifts...
...unloveable businessman and laughable drunk, and Virginia Cherrill is as appropriately sweet and endearing as any in the long line of Hollywood waifs. The film, however, never strays far from its hero: this is the Tramp's story, and Charlie Chaplin is the Tramp. More than anything in the plot's evolution or even the set-up of individual scenes, the humor and-or sadness evoked depends on Chaplin's unique blend of esprit and helplessness in this, his best-known character. He always chooses just the right foolish grin, the exact degree of surprise, the perfect whimper of apology...