Word: macguffin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...also gave them grownup female allies. Poor Richard has to make do with disco-bopping Michele (Emmanuelle Seigner), who is every father figure's nightmare. She is an amiable girl, but without common sense or discernible attention span. It is she, vaporishly bearing Frantic's MacGuffin, who mixes up her bag with the Walkers' luggage at the airport, thus starting off all their troubles...
Even so, Archer is a master entertainer, and on the trail he produces one of the best MacGuffins of recent popular fiction. (MacGuffin was Alfred Hitchcock's name for the object or secret that sets the plot churning.) The time is 1966, and Soviet Chairman Leonid Brezhnev, no less, is trying desperately to find a famous icon spirited away from the Winter Palace in the last days of the Czar. It passed through the hands of the Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goring, who gave it to Scott's father, his jailer after World War II. The late Scott Sr., in turn...
...icon itself, though valuable, is merely the box that contains the MacGuffin, an astonishing and unsuspected 19th century document. It seems that in 1867, when the world thought that Russia had sold a certain large piece of real estate to a young Western power for $7 million, what was really signed (and nicknamed Seward's folly) was only a 99-year lease. A crucial clause allows the Soviet Union to reclaim its property by paying a large sum in gold before the lease expires. Brezhnev, a stonehearted landlord, rubs his hands and plots eviction. Will Scott and the female bass...
...Argo City, a surviving Kryptonian colony in "inner space," depends on the omegahedron for its energy. Chief Scientist Zaltar (Peter O'Toole) steals the magic ball, Supergirl loses it, and then steals Zaltar's ship to find it. Arriving on earth in full costume, she starts hunting for the MacGuffin (Alfred Hitchcock's) word for the jewel/microfilm/painting/whatever that everyone is hunting for in a typical thriller...
...only is this subplot illogical and a waste of time, it tears down all the suspense the MacGuffin is supposed to create. Odell makes ludicrously pointless decisions like having Supergals' roomie the cousin of Lois Lane, or having Selena's exhenchman Nigel (Peter Cooke) a math teacher at Lee's school...