Word: plot
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...getting madder with each page. "I was appalled by the kind of books making enormous successes," he remembers. Rather than curse the darkness, McGrady lit upon the idea of how to succeed in bestsellerdom without really trying. He turned to his typewriter and, within a week, finished a plot outline and a memorandum that he distributed to nearly a hundred of his friends. "As one of Newsday's truly outstanding literary talents," the now-historic document began, "you are hereby officially invited to become the co-author of a bestselling novel." Each contributor would write one chapter...
...plot is as simple as a storybook. Philip (Mark Lester) is a ten-year-old child who wanders the moors of Devonshire, wondering at the endless varieties of nature around him. His only companion is a retired colonel (John Mills) who teaches him how to identify wildlife and how to train and fly a falcon. But Philip cannot communicate either his enthusiasm or thanks: he is autistic, a puzzle and a burden to his parents for most of his life. It is not until after he encounters a wild white colt early one morning that he begins even to respond...
Those filmgoers who have read the Quartet will be somewhat baffled by much of the plot and motivation in the film; those who have not will be completely and hopelessly confused. The first -and better-part of Justine is devoted mostly to atmospherics, establishing the characters and their relationships with one another and the city of Alexandria. Director George Cukor had a good old-fashioned time sweeping his camera over studio-made streets and palaces, working himself up to a murder at a masked ball. After that, he and Screenwriter Marcus apparently decided that it was time to get down...
...thing is that Macdonald seems to have been listening. The Goodbye Look is overlong for its specious plot, weighted down with pompous prose about lost opportunities, missed communications, failed lives. As in several Macdonald mysteries, the story itself concerns a troubled youth-in this case, a rich college student who may have committed three murders, but because of head wounds and shock, cannot remember whether...
...intended as symbolic of general existential despair and specific revulsion against California materialism. The trouble is that the symbols are strewn on the page like shorthand glyphs rather than metaphors. As Macdonald used to know, and now seems to forget, the order of imperatives in mystery writing is plot first, red herrings second, and philosophizing last...