Word: plot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Glinka's 19th-century flag-waver, as in other current versions, attention has been directed away from the young Tsar and focused on the heroic popular leaders of the national uprising against the invading Poles in 1611-13. With that party-line emendation, the opera's melodramatic plot has been preserved intact. Weak in leading roles (Bass Miro Changalovich and Soprano Maria Glavachevich), the present version is thunderously impressive in its choral and ensemble passages, sung by the Yugoslav Army Chorus...
...Labyrinths. The plot slithers like a water moccasin through the canebrakes among four narrators and unnumbered previous Faulkner books; it more or less turns around the fact that Eula, daughter of the old. failed squire Varner, has become pregnant-though nobody is sure by whom. Varner marries her off to Flem Snopes, who advances from shortest-order cook to bank vice president, then moves up several more rungs of Jefferson's social ladder when he permits "Major" De Spain to cuckold him with Eula. His motives are Snopesean and Faulknerian: through a kind of sexual osmosis, he hopes that...
...lust for his career. He feels the pangs of his "hunger for immortality" as he stares out. of the window in his eight-room apartment overlooking Lake Michigan. "I wish I could be a lawyer, a great stage performer, a John Gielgud, an archcriminal. I would love to plot the strategy of a great bank holdup. I frequently plotted one and never carried it through." Then Miller's pleasant voice hits a note of deadly earnest. "I can think of no higher honor than of being asked by the citizens to be mayor of Chicago. I have certainly indicated...
Offenbach's brand of light opera is ever so much more frothy than its contemporary Anglo-Saxon counterpart, with little of the latter's pointed if slightly aging satire. It consists for the most part of many very agreeable musical pieces linked together by a singularly loose thread of plot. This plot centers less on Orpheus, represented as a violinist with a vast distaste for Eurydice, than on Jupiter's attempts to get her away from the tender mercies of her kidnaper, Pluto, so that he may have her for his own tender mercies. Jupiter's efforts are complicated...
...which could compose a solid, bottom-of-the-barrel melodrama. The plot runs along smoothly, but is not better than most plots. The actors have choice lines much of the time, but they must also bring off some pretty shoddy writing: "kiss me Richard; kiss me as if it were the last time." The film is raised to the level of superlative, escapism entertainment because fine acting gives an indifferent story meaning beyond its worth; there are no second rate performances. Casablanca is an artificial world, where people who are not people are ideal though heroes, or murderers, or females...