Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...gullies get deepest in those long stretches between musical routines when the production falls back on Fred Grandy's script. Loosely modeled on a "Danish" myth of monsters and monster-slayers, Grandy's book offers no more and no less than the formulaic plot on which Padding productions usually hang their gags, lyrics, and kick-line. Crisis strikes the oversexed and overhung court of King Holroes the Horney of Denmark (Jack Olive) when the man-eating Grendel family, monsters from the nearby Black Lake, emerge to lay claim to Hotroes' frontheavy daughter, Princess Boobhilde (Line Caplan). With the kingdom paralyzed...
Audiences are cating up M. A. S. H. only because it puts a little complexity into character and plot development. The film is neither relevant nor savage-nor particularly anti-war: it's just so last you don't notice its superficiality till you leave the theater. While a grisly joke is being played on Elliot Gould, Sutherland is over there asserting his salty personality, and when that begins to pall your attention is diverted by a new twist on that old running gag in the background. M. A. S. H. simply gives its audience more than one thing...
...centuries hence and rather predictably envisions mankind living passive and at peace under the tutelage of a gigantic computer named Uni. It doles out compulsory, will-killing drugs and makes the major decisions of every man's life. Yet the characters seem more pompous than drugged. The plot, despite a few captivating wrinkles, is the classic man-beats-awesome-machine gambit borrowed from science fiction...
...relationship between the plot of this clumsily simple-minded melodrama called . . . tick . . . tick . . . tick . . . and the slick simple-mindedness of In the Heat of the Night is a lot more than coincidental. Director Ralph Nelson (TIME, Feb. 2) is obviously a man whose political conscience is easily stirred, probably by reading the box-office receipts in Variety. Everything about his film is tacky, derivative, finally exploitative-except for a funny and wise performance by Fredric March. As crafty Mayor Jeff Parks, March transforms a dime-store piece like . . . tick . . . tick . . . tick . . . into a one-jewel movement...
Mark Twain anticipated the "crickit" problem when he first published Huckleberry Finn in 1884. In a prefatory notice he warned that persons attempting to find either motive, moral or plot in the novel would be respectively prosecuted, banished or shot. It was like a carrot farmer putting up a no-trespass sign for rabbits. The book was pounced on immediately by the upholders of the well-made novel and 19th century gentility. Most critics found it shapeless, and vulgar. "If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses," said Louisa May Alcott...