Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...plot--broken up by newsreels, dramatic profiles of famous American figures from a ruggedly moralistic Eugene V. Debs to Rudolph Valentino and assorted other collage skits and "cut-outs"--centers on the life of J. Ward Moorehouse, Dos Passos' version of The American Success story...
...start of the play Moorehouse is an undistinguished, boyish employee in a real estate firm. He is clean-cut and innocent with bright blue eyes, and he meets a wealthy woman whom he marries several scenes later. As Moorehouse's career soars, the plot switches focus to Janey and Joe Williams, two kids from a middle-class Georgetown background. Unlike Moorehouse, Janey and Joe do not become success stories. Joe runs away from home, enlists in the navy, deserts, and become a workingman whose "future is behind him." Janey ends up as Moorehouse's secretary...
Christie, probably the most famous and certainly the most prolific of detective novelists, is the master of complex plots, ambiguous clues, and cardboard characters. Her stories are infamous for the trick endings--the sharp twist of plot indicting someone ostensibly cleared of suspicion or never suspected...
...Little Indians contains the basic Christie trademarks--a cast of stereotyped characters--a retired general, a spinster, a professional man, a dashing playboy--and the usual shock ending. The plot and suspense rely on interaction between the characters--their growing suspicion of one another and the inexorable stripping of civilized facades. Beneath lie passions Christie believes can drive even the most unlikely people to murder. The success of the play thus relies on good acting to dramatize the character relationships, and fast-paced direction to highlight tension...
...film brings together assorted plot strands, the principal one involving Kirk Douglas as a former intelligence man, whose son, Robin, has been abducted by his former organization, presumably to be used as some kind of secret weapon (he makes foreign presidents' noses bleed--just kidding; actually, he can marshall quite a fury when mad). Douglas must elude the network of agents controlled by John Cassavetes, whose arm he crippled during the terrorist raid that begins the film, in which Robin is captured. Enter Gillian (Amy Irving), another telekinetic whom Cassavetes is grooming at a parapsychic institute to join Robin...