Word: flashback
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...stage production, for instance, was a monologue in which Amanda Wingfield, a demolished southern belle, recalls her past. It was poignant because the belle was so far from her romantic youth. The picture, however, in order to avoid focusing on one face for several minutes, adds a flashback to the monologue; the belle's past becomes much closer and more real than it should...
...flashback, Fairbanks visits Vosnia to pick up a medal for a new operating technique and to demonstrate the surgery. He discovers in mid-operation that, through a switch in patients, he is working on the innards of General Niva, the country's dictator. The operation goes well. Later, over billiards, Villain Hawkins explains just why the general's survival-or at least the illusion of it-is politically urgent at the moment. If the dictator dies, the surgeon's knowledge of the fact would make his liquidation imperative...
Apart from the changed format and the tampered ending, the movie suffers a letdown in British Actress Gertrude Lawrence's performance. She does a competent job, marred by some confusion of accents, and her versatility enables her to flit coquettishly through a soft-focus flashback recounting the fancied conquests of her youth. Yet she never gives the role the emotional tug or the full measure of addled humor that it had in the hands of the stage's late great Laurette Taylor...
...glaring of these is an overstuffed, unbalanced script. Billy Wilder and Charlie Brackett have just laid it on too thick, a fact which becomes more and more apparent as the film draws to its climax. The outcome is never in doubt since the picture is nearly all one big flashback, narrated by the hero who is floating in a swimming pool with three bullets in his back...
Spinning out his story in a series of flashback monologues, Novelist Foote has a keen eye for the drama of a small-town courtroom in the South and an unmistakable talent for reporting the impact of human passion on the spectators' dull, ordered lives. All that keeps him from writing a really first-class novel is an unfortunate tendency to borrow overmuch from the verbal mannerisms of Neighbor William Faulkner. But there is nothing wrong with Novelist Foote that a little more literary independence cannot cure...