Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...rather portentously to make his troubled school a metaphor for a sick .world, and fails. Despite the fact that Marasco once taught in a boys' school, he seems not to know that children are astonishingly acute judges of their teachers, or perhaps the knowledge did not suit his plot. At any rate, logic is the last guest to bring to this breath-taking show...
...headless golf shaft that held a "Make Love, not War" placard. With the election only six weeks away, the President (Peter Bonerz) has no time for grief and after another Cabinet conclave the cause of death proves to be Communist food poisoning. That's about all the plot there is, except for numbingly bathetic side trips to dying soldiers in the foxholes of Brazil...
...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...