Word: subplot
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...ball, with an improbable guest list, ranging from ex-convicts to publishing executives to members of Author Clifford Irving's sometimes exotic circle on the Balearic island of Ibiza. The Howard Hughes affair was turning into a still more absorbing drama, with among other things an emotionally fascinating subplot of adultery. The unmasking of the plot would come soon, it seemed-perhaps this week. When it does, Irving confided cryptically to a friend in Manhattan, "you'll be amazed at how simple...
...speed up the action and cuts scenes mercilessly. It is toward the great events that his imagination tends--Lear raging at Cordelia or mad in the storm on the heath or overwhelmed with regret before his death--and on these scenes Brook lavishes his attention lovingly. To the Gloucester subplot he is for the most part cursory. He reserves his ingenuity for Lear alone. And as Lear, Paul Scofield carries the film...
...spiritual malaise, with his roommate, the campus radical who goes mad in the last reel, representing the inevitable result of purposeful action in an insane world. But the film is too incoherent to sustain such interpretations. The action sways sloppily between the ballplayer and the radical, straddling an unwieldy subplot concerning the ballplayer's romance with a bitchy, nymphy faculty wife...
...wreaking bloody revenge on the Nazi occupation forces. There is one sardonic sequence where he teaches the kids to shoot machine guns and another, quite brutal, where they all joyously massacre a town full of Nazis. Director Phil Karlson's fadeout is hopelessly sentimental, and there is a subplot about a woman doctor that sabotages a goodly portion of the film, but Hornets' Nest survives all this as a morbid if minor curiosity...
Fetishist. McMahon's novel suffers from problems of technique and plotting. Timmy reads minds and recounts the distant intimate activities of others to an extent that damages credibility. Melodrama intervenes at too strategic moments: a convenient suicide wraps up one subplot, a scientist loses his wallet and laundry with cosmic consequences, an offstage Russian turns out to be a sex fetishist rather than...