Word: plotting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Hitting a new high in mediocrity, the plot of "Road to Rio" lurches along pathetically from one tiny crescendo to the next, leaving in its wake the battered carcasses of every stock situation the film's makers could find on the Paramount lot. A picture with some fast, funny slapstick, or even a loud, nerve-numbing orchestra, could perhaps survive such a story treatment, but this one throws in the towel early in the evening...
...When he tried to question them, they shot him dead, then fled through the ruins at the base of the Acropolis. (The cloth bag, it turned out, contained arms.) One of the three, a Communist hatchetman named Stamatis Bitsikas, was caught, broke down under interrogation and confessed a Red plot to murder Stylianos Gonatas, head of the National Liberal Party, and two other prominent politicians. Bitsikas "sang" so effectively that 57 more Communists were arrested, then 300 more. The final roundup came on Christmas Eve, after the Vafiades broadcast...
Hollywood, ransacking the lives of composers for plot material, has never got around to Modeste Petrovich Musorgsky. The composer of Boris Godunov suffered no searing romances, died a quaking alcoholic at 42; during most of his life he was regarded, with loving condescension, as little more than a talented idiot, even by the other four of the Russian Five...
...diamond lying neglected amidst the track of the nineteenth century. The orchestral passages are exceptional even for Mozart, and the choral writing is superior to that in his more famous operas. As presented in Mr. Goldovsky's adaptation, the first act was highly conventionalized and contained too much plot exposition in the form of recitative--arias were scarce, in fact. The second act starts, however, with a superb aria and a duet, a brilliant quartet follows, and from then on the opera becomes what Mr. Goldovsky calls it, "unquestionably one of the greatest musical masterpieces of all time...
...lynch plot was discovered. Lieut. Thomas Massie and his collaborators were arrested and convicted of manslaughter -then freed after serving a sentence of one hour. The rape charges against the five men (including the murdered Kahahawai) were dropped for lack of evidence...