Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...sturdy coconut shoots. Stubbornly convinced that the earth would revive, the farmers tried a third time. Early one morning, as soon as Regional Force troops had cleared the mines and booby traps set by the Viet Cong the night before, the village elders made their way to the small plot where the earthworms were waging their struggle to survive. Writes Chu Thao...
...Salter, working from an Irwin Shaw short story, has kept the plot simple, concentrating on nuance of character and atmosphere. Taylor (Sam Waterston) and Bert (Robie Porter) are two decidedly American college boys touring Europe during the summer in a beat-up Peugeot. One morning in Florence's Piazza della Signoria, Taylor meets a bored and footloose English girl named Marty (Charlotte Rampling) who is alone on holiday and obviously receptive to some attractive company. She takes the boys to visit some jaded Italian friends; they respond by inviting her along on the remainder of their trip...
...fault is partly in the cumbrous plot. After a TV giveaway marriage, Myrtle (Lynn Redgrave) and Jeb (James Coburn) find themselves hostile strangers. Winded, impotent, pulling marijuana smoke into a cancerous lung, Jeb courts death instead of his bride. In a Louisiana mansion as corroded as he is, Jeb introduces Myrtle to his half-brother Chicken (Robert Hooks). From the newlyweds' point of view, Chicken has several drawbacks: he is surly, he is vengeful and he is black?"a mistake" claims Jeb, "of my father's." Like two halves of the same soul, the siblings are rivals for the property...
...probably the greatest social critic among America's film-makers. "Most people say [social contradictions] should be left to the newspapers. But I say, on the contrary, that it is necessary to give them a dramatic form." For Fuller 'giving them a dramatic form' means more than inventing a plot that sets out right and wrong and a hero who battles for the good. None of his characters are aristocrats standing above society. Vulnerable without being weak or sentimental, they are beaten when they try to achieve their goals by ignoring some condition of social reality...
Various interpretations of this strange plot suggest themselves. One stresses retribution both moralistic and Freudian. The hero entered the asylum to exploit its patients, to use them as sources of information rather than as humans. The plot comes full circle, making him mad through the ravings of those he tried to use. Its symmetry is expressed in a typically explicit line of Fuller dialogue: "What an irony- an insane mute winning the Pulitzer Prize...