Word: plot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...uncertain future. A tire or tie-rod failure on a Mercedes-Benz, an army plot like the two Pérez Jiménez staged, or a simple slip-up by a guard or a food-taster might remove the strongman from the scene. Lacking democracy's orderly system for succession, Venezuela might suffer a turbulent struggle for power...
...useful handmaiden for melodrama. And exploited, as in Tonight in Samarkand, with all the blare of circus music and color of circus life, it achieves for two acts a certain quality of nice old-fashioned excitement. The play goes in for few philosophic frills, merely uses fate as a plot gimmick. A blonde girl symbolizes death, but no more abstrusely than a headwaiter symbolizes dinner...
...reader. For Author Marquand manages a highly skillful double-switch with the reader's emotions. Early in the book, he smoothly turns the nice youngster into a glossy horror; later on he turns the horror into a rather sad character who compels sympathy. Novelist Marquand's plot may sag at points, but the caricature of his hero is fascinating, down to the last page, when wise and forbearing Sylvia tucks in her husband with a kiss and a Nembutal. Perhaps the most pathetic thing about Willis Wayde is that, in his own peculiar way, he believes in what...
...house." As in his other books (The Nice American, The Center of the Stage), Novelist Sykes cleaves right to the secret core of his characters-ex-Communist literary snobs, envenomed small-town society queens, Point Four evangelists, coronary-conscious manufacturers. But this time he has also hacked a plot from political headlines, and so blunted his aptest insights...
...looks and the gross itch they often portend, ekes out his boredom by cadging bliss at a local refreshment booth (Vera Clouzot). Jo (Charles Vanel), a career thug who fears nothing he can get his hairy hands on and thinks he can get them on everything, hops spiderishly from plot to pointless plot. Luigi (Folco Lulli) is a big warm country boy from Italy, so stupid (as Mario sees him) that he works for a living. Bimba (Peter Van Eyck) is a graduate of a Nazi concentration camp, a German as hard as such an education can make...