Word: contrivedness
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With a little careful pruning in the first of the two acts, and a general improvement in timing, "Around the World" might bowl its audience over. At this point spectacle cannot make up for empty lines and contrived situations.
The Battle of Agincourt is not realistic. Olivier took great care not to make it so. To find the "kind of poetic country" he wanted, and to avoid such chance anachronisms as air raids (the picture was made in Britain during the war), Olivier shot the battle sequence in Ireland...
It was not the first time. The U.S. had produced few better-known heroes-and almost none so artificially contrived. Cody was an Indian scout and buffalo hunter in his youth, but the rest of the "Buffalo Bill" legend sprang straight from the brain of a raffish scribbler known as...
Before Bomb No. 1 was exploded in New Mexico, scientists spent more than a year designing, building and installing instruments and recording gadgets. For the immensely more complicated problem of an overwater test, these would all have to be rebuilt and new ones contrived. Even with the backlog of experience...
There are weaknesses: the film is episodic and some of the sense of mounting horror at this rake's progress is lost because of this. The ending, Wilder and Brackett's genuflection to Hollywood's age-old formulate of the Happy Ending, is contrived and unbelievable. But Milland'e portrayal...