Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Straw Dogs is Sam Peckinpah's film of this year. You do the man injustice if you follow plot hints superficially without noting the ambiguities he's planned. Susan George's character is, I think, the key to a generous interpretation, and much more than the hot-assed coed she's been taken for. There are no simple heroes in the film: all are caught in cultural conflicts and personal traumas which Peckinpah doesn't sort out sufficiently. Peckinpah's belief in territorial imperatives works better on a mythic scale than on that of chamber drama. Still...
...bind his characters to the dual power of ethnic identity and omnipresent past. His young people run away and return, reject and make up, but the two dominant forces always narrow the scope of De Sica's drama to his claustrophobic universe, by holding all involved within the plot of the garden. Only here can they explore their common identities as Jews. Only here can they watch the ghosts of their pasts frolic through the haunts of childhood...
...play the game again. The habits of our minds force us to once again look for the "explanation" for the events we see. In The Birthday Party, one could explain McCann's and Goldberg's actions as a fiendish underworld plot to get Stanley. Here it's just as simple: Ruth must have been a prostitute when Teddy married her (the suggestion is made several times in the play). Perhaps Teddy has brought her to Europe to work out the unresolvable differences between them, has failed in his efforts, and is now willing to let the family solve his problem...
...from ex-convicts to publishing executives to members of Author Clifford Irving's sometimes exotic circle on the Balearic island of Ibiza. The Howard Hughes affair was turning into a still more absorbing drama, with among other things an emotionally fascinating subplot of adultery. The unmasking of the plot would come soon, it seemed-perhaps this week. When it does, Irving confided cryptically to a friend in Manhattan, "you'll be amazed at how simple...
...members of a numerous and all but unmanageable cast of characters, whose problems range from life and death to the merits of stocks v. tax-free municipal bonds. The main story line-the one that will remain after most of the rest of the plot has been cut away for a workable script-is about a Mexican-American Air Force sergeant who shoots and kills a hippie drug dealer on a military base in the Southwest. The longhair, a local counterculture idol, had deflowered the sergeant's rambling rose of a daughter...