Word: plot
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Sometimes insects are benefited by spraying. A woodland plot in Massachusetts, infested with gypsy moth caterpillars, was sprayed with 1.5 lbs. of DDT per acre. With the caterpillars wiped out, the forest remained green and flourishing, and soon had a normal population of non-pest insects. A nearby plot, left unsprayed, was defoliated by the caterpillars and lost two-thirds of its normal insect population...
...grade Hollywood corn. Sample: Dan shows up outside the bedroom window of his dying master (Henry Hull) looking as if he were prepared to read the burial service. Equally lugubrious are Dennis O'Keefe, Gail Russell and Ruth Warrick, all of whom are required by the formula plot to get badly entangled in their own emotional traces...
...scene is the 1880s, when France had just shipped the Statue of Liberty (in 200-odd cases) to the U.S. The plot concerns a circulation war over the statue between Joseph Pulitzer's N.Y. World and James Gordon Bennett's N.Y. Herald. A Herald photographer brings over from Paris the girl who was Sculptor Bartholdi's model for the statue-only it turns out that she wasn't. The customary hocus-pocus leads to the customary happy ending...
...only real fun to be had from the belaboring of this plot comes from Ronald Reagan, who rarely gets a crack at light comedy. He does a good job of giving some old gags a new gloss; and masquerading as an immigrant student in one of Schoolmarm Mayo's naturalization classes, he gets off an excellent range of muddled European accents. Brightest piece of invention: a bit of hot-weather Americana, in which the sound track picks up the nasal lovemaking of a Brooklyn couple in the moonlit shadows of Jones Beach...
...mysterious young woman (Jane Greer). In the third car is Mitchum's superior officer (William Bendix). Trailing far behind at a leisurely Latin pace is Ramon Novarro, a sly Mexican police official who, like the audience, is trying his best to figure out the turns & twists of the plot...