Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Beatrice to his Dante. Although she is happily married, Natalie is immediately attracted to her professor's radiance of mind. He pursues her, she capitulates only too willingly, and they begin a year-long series of passionate, clandestine meetings. In her first novel, Ellen Schwamm takes this conventional plot and Manhattan milieu and creates a fresh and elegant narrative...
...autobiographical heroine herself. That odious chore has fallen instead to Carol Burnett, an actress who is often capable of extracting humor from even the most puerile material. This is one of her rare failures. Bombeck's stale jokes about crabgrass and Tupperware parties defy levitation; the cutesie plot is predictable to anyone who has ever encountered any incarnation of Please Don 't Eat the Daisies. Unfortunately, Burnett doesn't get any help from Director Robert Day. His idea of high drama is to end a scene with a close-up of characters getting up from a couch...
...director, Harvey Seifter, gives Jenny's big number, "Pirate Jenny," to Polly Peachum (Ann Titolo) instead. Well, directors have taken liberties with this script before, and Titolo sings the old favorite with spirit; but Jenny without her touching, spine-chilling "dreams of a kitchen maid," becomes just another plot-moving character...
...evening. In most productions this is Polly's lament; I suppose Lucy took this one on after Polly got "Pirate Jenny." Playing a game of musical numbers like this may match singers up with the songs they can perform, but it also unties the music from the plot...
Aside from the witty lines he fed Mor ley, Screenwriter Peter Stone has concoct ed a script strewn with terrible puns ("Ban the bombe") and snickering double-entendre gags that make all the tired connections between food and sex. The arbitrary plot about a chef murderer hops from place to place on the slightest whim. It is little more than an excuse for cameo appearances by top European actors (Philippe Noiret, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Jean Rochefort) and restaurants (Paris' Tour d' Argent, London's Café Royal). The settings are sumptuously photographed by John Alcott (Barry Lyndon...