Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...obvious themes are built into the plot, and you can't ignore them. Peckinpah has put a rational, wishy-washy liberal under stress, simply so that he may understand man's violence: that it is inherent in his nature, that sometimes the violent solutions are the only valid ones. But the situations Peckinpah presents are really more involved, if not to any greater extent developed...
Since Peckinpah fails to give setting and plot sufficient weight, he must rely on characterization to a greater extent than he ever has before. Sadly, despite some embarassing attempts at suggestively hole-filling dialogue (we learn that Amy thought David uncommitted in the States, and that's that), we don't know Peckinpah's characters one-fifth as well as we do Bergman's at their most obscure...
Like lovers, the one thing religious minorities have in common is the conviction that they are unique. Like lovers, they are of course right. But the passion for God, like other passions, obeys certain plot patterns-all subject to certain beginnings, middles and ends. The kindling, the cooling and the rekindling of the Quakers is the present theme of Dutch Novelist-Playwright Jan de Hartog. In this first of two novels in progress, he takes the history of the Religious Society of Friends from Cromwell's England, 1652, to Pennsylvania, 1755, and the brink of the French-Indian...
After the seers and prophets, so De Hartog's plot ordains, come the coders and the organizers. In Lancashire, Fox converted Margaret Fell; indeed, he was later to marry her. But in a curious sense she converted Fox, or at least his message, to what suited her: a religion of "service rather than salvation," as De Hartog puts it. He retells how this judge's wife organized the Quakers in prison, sending them letters and survival kits consisting of socks, mufflers, weevil-proof biscuits, a jar of prunes for the bowels' sake, and of course a Bible...
...difficulty comes from the script, by Harry and R.M. Fink, which fails to disguise its Hollywood origins. More legend than plot, the story fumbles when it wanders away from its central combat. The cops speak a special kind of cinematic tough talk. Exit lines sound like clever phrases the messieurs Fink have spent weeks sweating out. The speech of a policeman's wife takes a few perfunctory swipes at social commentary, but the film's heart is elsewhere, splashing in the gore...