Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...details of their lives as vague as possible. Almost nothing significant happens on the screen; everything is deliberately consigned to the oft-contradicted past or is omitted and simply brushed over by the narrator (as when and why and how Anna and Andreas start living together, for instance). Plot movement plays such a minimal role that the film seems almost a sequence of still photographs on the varieties of physical and psychic contortions: either monotonous guilt and anxiety or momentary flare-ups of violence...
...title of which is the Greek symbol for "he still lives." A powerfully contrived and brilliantly acted thriller (TIME, Dec. 5), Z purports to give a picture of contemporary Greece by focusing on a right-wing conspiracy to kill a leftist politician. At the bottom of this plot are revealed all the elements that are bound to rouse the liberal Western conscience: self-righteous military men, violence-loving fascists and broad hints of American complicity...
Compressed History. Where Z departs from the facts is in its implication that the present junta led by Colonel George Papadopoulos was involved in the right-wing plot. By a convenient compression of history, Z strongly suggests that the junta engineered the assassination, then used the ensuing disorders as a pretext to seize power. The assassination actually occurred four years before the colonels came to power, and there is no known evidence linking them with it. The episode, in fact, had quite different results. It helped topple the conservative regime of Constantine Karamanlis, which was then replaced by the left...
...that his duo of lovers plight their troth to each other so that he may always be true, in his fashion, to both. The countess is delighted, for the bride's dowry will bring in enough gold to fill the castle moat. Something for everyone, even before the plot reaches ludicrous heights of sadistic mayhem...
...good deal more could have been done in the way of such niceties as plot and character, but the atmosphere can hardly be faulted. That is not surprising, considering that Robert Stone Pryor is a pseudonym for Cecilia Holland, at 26 the well-known author of four well-wrought and successful works of romantic historical fiction: The Firedrake, 1966; Rakóssy, 1967; The Kings in Winter, 1968; Until the Sun Fails, 1969; and most recently Antichrist, released this spring at almost the same time as Cold Iron. A former graduate student in medieval history at Columbia and a onetime...