Word: plot
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Trees and Wand'rin' Star -is strong enough to levitate several musicals. But only Presnell has a legitimate singing voice, and he is given a single solo and a walk-on role as a bordello manager. Seberg's dubbed voice is as thin as the plot, and Eastwood's real one is scarcely a millimeter thicker. Marvin gamely rasps his lines, but crooning is not his bag. Comedy is. Fitted with outrageous muttonchop whiskers and a mop of a mustache, he postures and pratfalls with a grace that was previously achieved only by Buster Keaton...
...film's plot, loosely patterned after The Cousins by Chabrol, is poorly handled. A guy comes to Cambridge to stay with a friend. His friend invites him to a party, where he meets a girl with whom he falls in love, but his hopes for their relationship are dashed when she suddenly decides to live with his friend. The various changes in their relationship are not adequately explored or explained, but are simply related, and are therefore hard to accept...
...usual Hitchcock high-angle, this shot expresses with a sort of warm detachment the romantic dimension of her personal anguish. The same attitude follows her and her uncle through the darkening stages of a deep love-attachment. Throughout they are true personalities, not walking abstractions. In parallel, the plot repeatedily breaks formulas to include sequences invented by a sympathetic, intuitive reaction to the personal material of the plot...
...doesn't explain the andience's feeling about any film as a whole. It doesn't treat the film's overall style, the way it relates all the characters to their setting. It treats character descripton only in one aspect: the characters relation to a plot scheme which consists of a series of personal transformations. For viewers who follow characters' changes very closely through a film, such an analysis is useful, though still incomplete. For those like me who react to characters intuitively, immediately, and once for all, only a more general analysis of character delincation explains feelings about...
...Shadow of a Doubt brings the best of these themes into a very tightly constructed drama, Returning to the original material of melodrama, it uses a family setting for a complex and subtle interplay of moral perceptions. At the same time the plot is constructed on personal progress; it follows the growth of moral and romantic awareness of an adolescent girl. But though it ends in a clear confrontation between good and evil its use of real locations and realistic performances maintains moral complexity and resonance through the film...