Word: plotting
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Lady Killer (Warner Brothers) illustrates its makers' theory that a James Cagney picture requires less plot than movement. Starting out as a routine record of the rise of Dan Quigley (James Cagney) in crookdom. Lady Killer abruptly shifts its ground, loses itself in aimless mockery of actors, film directors, newspaper critics. In Hollywood hiding from New York police, Quigley gets a film bit as an Indian chief, becomes a star by subscribing to a stamp-bureau which sends him fan mail from all over the world. Tired of bashing his ladies on the chin. Cagney in this picture drags...
...Before Dashiell Hammett came over the horizon, U. S. readers could point with pride to no first-rate living U. S. authors of detectifiction (with the exception of such competent plot-tanglers as Mary Roberts Rinehart, S. S. Van Dine). Though murder stories have long been the main meat of a solid minority of U. S. readers, the quality of the domestic supply has been fortified by English importations. But no longer can oldsters shake their heads over the departed glories of Edgar Allan Poe. In Dashiell Hammett the U. S. has again a first-rate writer of crime stories...
...having too good a time, knows and dislikes the queer Wynant family too well-until a gunman breaks into his hotel room early one morning to crease him with a bullet. Then he gets grudgingly busy. Before Wynant is found, two more murders are uncovered. More conventional in plot than his earlier books and less slaughterous (Red Harvest had at least a dozen murders), The Thin Man is easily the U. S. murder story of the past year, adds one more proof to Author Hammett's title of No. 1 Crime-story Writer of the U. S. Hammett fans...
Back we go to the good old days of the world war to discover that one man believed that war was hell and that men were like the rats in Norway which swam to sea and drowned. It is a very interesting, indeed a charming plot. Richard Dix is the virile young humanitarian who hates fighting, but he loves a simple lass who tells him that he is as yellow as yellow chalk. Therefore, he enlists, and we next see him mingling with a group of neurasthenic aviators over there. Once in the war, Rocky Thorne becomes a cruel killer...
PASSIONS SPIN THE PLOT - Vardis Fisher-Caxton & Doubleday, Doran ($2.50). If the last two volumes of his tetralogy are on a par with the first two (In Tragic Life-TIME, July 3; Passions Spin the Plot}. U. S. critics will be speaking of Idaho's Author Vardis Fisher in the same breath with Indiana's Theodore Dreiser. No less doggedly candid than Dreiser but a more artful writer, Author Fisher intends his four-decker novel to be an honest book. Because he has had a hard, unhappy life and because he writes only of what he knows...