Word: flashbacking
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...curse, original sin. Such a theme would be no novelty from François Mauriac or Graham Greene, but it is surprising when it comes from an existentially-minded French intellectual. As a novelist, Camus dissipates his shock effect by telling his story in a long-winded flashback. As a thinker, he remains as provocative, and to many of his French fellow intellectuals as annoying, as an alarm clock going off in the middle of the night...
This collection of oddballs is wryly amusing as well as highly implausible. There is no plot, and the characters impinge on each other as temperaments rather than as people. All the action is in flashback, and the key act is a long-ago kiss stolen by the playwright from the virginal mother of three, a kiss that somehow set in motion for the woman and her future husband and children that secret civil war between Puritanism and passion, a war of the blood more openly and obviously dramatized by Author Morris in the spectacle of bloodless Americans watching the bloodfest...
While the acting is above reproach, the photography and background music add little when they are not distracting. The technical qualities of the film are not helped by splices and cuts. The flashback technique is effective, although the point of view is not maintained faithfully throughout. The film is most effective in the intimate scenes when the internal conflict of Hugo can be felt most dramatically. As such moments comprise the better part of the film, Dirty Hands is powerful not only as an insight into Communism, but also as a drama of an individual searching for himself...
...selling off furniture from an apartment lent him by a friend. As the book's narrator blurts, straight off: "What I want is some understanding of why it all happened-why an otherwise honorable man should suddenly act like a criminal and a cad." In a booklong flashback British Novelist Nigel (Mine Own Executioner) Balchin attempts just that, providing a prime example of that literary love child of Freud, the "why-he-dunnit...
...Dangerous Age. The bulk of the novel begins in flashback one summer day in 1937 when Lucy Crown examines her nude body in the mirror and realizes she has reached the dangerous age: "There are the little secret marks of time on the flesh of my thighs. I must walk more. I must sleep more. I must not think about it. Thirty-five." Hubby Oliver still appreciates her ("You have a wonderful belly"), but he is preoccupied, as usual, with getting away from their lakeside summer place for a busy, productive week at the plant. Lucy is left with...