Word: plot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...worry about figuring out the plot of this one; everybody has his own version, and it doesn't really matter. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall embellish the incomprehensible Raymond Chandler book with their own brand of loving, fighting, killing, and grunting, and that should be enough for anyone. William Faulkner is responsible for the scenario...
...earth. Pronouncing a scarcely original, but nevertheless grandiose, anathema, he finds everyone corroded through the decline of love and the absence of Christian faith. Rangy in setting (New England, Greenwich Village, Paris, Spain, Italy, Central America), aswim in erudition, semi-Joycean in language, glacial in pace, irritatingly opaque in plot and character, The Recognitions is one of those eruptions of personal vision that will be argued about without being argued away. U.S. novel writing has a strikingly fresh talent to watch, if not to cheer...
Speaking colloquially, one might describe the story of intimate relations as "incredible." (As matter of fact the movie's five characters, who speak extremely colloquially, themselves describe it with just that word at least twenty times during the evening.) Basically, the plot resembles the eternal loves triangle. Cocteau's imagination is such, however, that in this case the such, however, that in this case the triangle turns out to be a pentagon, and at one point the principals even try to straighten things out by introducing another, imaginary person as a sixth vertex...
When Ambassador Trimble refuses to back his son's campaign for Congress, son Hank starts nasty rumors about the old man and sweeps to victory by glibly explaining a suddenly uncovered big bank account in an emotional TV broadcast. Despite his newspaper plot, talented Novelist Sykes has written a striking book about a prodigal father and a young fogy...
...acting, like the plot, is distinguished by competent humor in all directions. Loring Smith, as the ex-business tycoon ("I don't get ulcers; I give 'em!") whose life in the Pentagon is made miserable by "the damned ole Senate, epitomizes this comic versatility. He delivers everything from vaudeville gags to a farcical high school oration, and is so unabashed a comedian that he laughts at his own material. The audience does too, of course. Ruth McDevitt plays Mrs. Laura Partridge, the ex-actress who attends a stock-holders meeting on the advice of her horoscope and ends up controlling...