Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Director Hubert Cornfield's Night of the Following Day was a surrealistic, purposely ambiguous thriller-at least it was when it was shown in movie theaters in 1969. Originally, the plot revolved round the adolescent daughter of a European millionaire who was apparently kidnaped by a gang of kinky criminals (including Rita Moreno, Richard Boone and Marlon Brando) and carried off to a deserted beach house, where she was held for ransom, threatened sexually and tortured by members of the gang. Cornfield's last scene, however, implied that perhaps the girl's whole story was just...
James Kardon must have had a riot writing the script. It's wild and fanciful, unfettered by plot or logic. The dialogue is a great mish-mash of half-digested morsels from Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Coleridge, Jefferson Airplane, the Beatles and whatever else was floating through Kardon's consciousness as he held pen in hand. The mysterious phrase that serves as title pops up again and again, meaning nothing in particular but continually teasing the audience...
...Company of last year, producer-director Prince has thrown out the time-honored musical convention of using songs to advance a simple-minded script in favor of letting the music add new levels of meaning to a sophisticated libretto (by James Goldman). In this way, the central plot idea of Follies becomes merely one more ingredient of the show rather than its raison d'etre...
...scene could be played integrally, not broken down shot by shot. Paradoxically, this shooting method gave the cutter more control than ever over the action, and Testament is one of Renoir's most precise films, full of a depth that befits the careful distinctions of its Jekyll-and-Hyde plot...
...throws out a little bit of sex, and a little bit of plot, and a little bit of pathos, like so many bones to hungry dogs. But he only teases our expectations. He gives us a shell of action and keeps promising that there is something more inside. We began to expect a culmination and there is none. There is only emotion tortured into the shape of story...