Word: plot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Israel profited. "Recently, Israel's name has been dropped from the plot, and none of us are sorry," observed Prime Minister Ben-Gurion...
Still, the picture has its moments, and the plot is still fresh and Greene enough. The two young leading players (Robert Ivers and Georgann Johnson) are less than sensational, but they show enough talent and training to make the early Ladd and Lake look comparatively sad. And Director James Cagney, in his first appearance behind the camera, manages to beauty-spot a few of the bare places with some characteristic Cagney touches...
After a lot of dull plot and duller dialogue (Brigitte: "I've got a flat." Man helping her with her bike: "I'd never have suspected"), the hero (Christian Marquand) refuses to marry the girl, so she takes his brother (Jean-Louis Trintignant) instead. She does her best to make her husband's brother jealous, and the moviegoer curious-here comes that sheet again. She wraps it around her so that the husband can see what's inside and the audience can't. But by this time, the spectator, if he happens to be grownup...
...Elsinore, argues Author West, represent all governments, all men. Nobody has clean hands. Ophelia is usually presented on the stage as a convent-type sweetie who has a nervous breakdown; in fact she is just "a disreputable young woman," a docile pawn in her father's plot to match her with Eligible Bachelor Hamlet. "No line in the play suggests that she felt either passion or affection for him." Even the ghost of Hamlet's father is tainted, as Author West sees it: he is the voice of the past, of tradition-and man's past...
...fact that thought cannot be directly expressed. Dialogue and music, Bluestone claims, are peripheral elements; the picture dominates. Even if dialogue is accepted as an external expression of thought, once spoken it is no longer a thought. The film must compensate for this by having a very graphic plot and by nuances of acting, particularly "microphysiognomy" or intricacies of facial expression...