Word: plotting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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UNDERGRADUATES LOVE to stage musical reviews. They require little scenery, characterization, or preparation. Singers like them because they offer solos enough even for the less-talented voices. Directors like them because they're easily transformed by adding and deleting numbers. Lazy audiences like them because there's no plot to follow, no psychological interplay to understand--only a leisurely ramble down musical garden-paths, on which the weary can close their eyes for intermittent stretches of time without missing much...
...rare photograph of the late Howard Hughes taken during his Chinese period," cracks Peter Sellers. Actually, it's Sellers in his newest movie, The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu. Sellers, ranging between the Himalayas (actually the French Alps) and London's Limehouse district, plays the legendary Sax Rohmer villain as a 168-year-old man who steals jewels to crush them into an elixir of life. No, the chefs attire wasn't necessary to cook up such an outlandish plot. It's for the Chinese feast he's preparing for the Tower of London...
...direction generally accentuates the script's failings. Though Huyck cuts frantically among his stories, he tuckers out the audience without ever accelerating the film. The elaborate finale, involving a chaotic end-of-term school play, does not achieve its intended purpose of ty ing all the plot lines into a bittersweet cli max. What is missing is Lucas' fluent visual language. In cinematic terms, French Postcards sadly proves to be not so much American Graffiti as fractured Franglais. Rich
What with the plot being so linear and the characters being so flat, there is nothing to hold one's attention except the sad reflection that the late .Robert Shaw (who plays the general, and whose last movie this is) spent too much of his career on such dismal efforts, as did Di rector Robson (The Champion), who has also died since principal photography was completed. Also present are Lee Mar vin, Linda Evans and Joe Namath, who wears cowboy getup to play a CIA type...
Follett's fissionable plot involves the intelligence agencies of three nations-Israel's Mossad, the Soviet KGB and Egypt's General Intelligence-as well as the fedayeen and the Mafia. It begins 20 years before the uranium theft, at, of all places, Oxford University. By not too improbable coincidence, three of the protagonists are students there: David Rostov, a Soviet who will later become an ambitious intelligence officer in Moscow; Yasif Hassan, a Palestinian who subsequently serves as a triple agent for the Egyptians, the Soviets and the fedayeen; and Nathaniel Dickstein, a cockney Jew who migrates...