Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...trial that had everything -indeed, too much of everything. There was a lanky young heir to a multimillion-dollar fortune as the central figure in a murky kidnaping plot, a desperate defendant charging that the whole caper had been an elaborate fake, and there were allegations about a homosexual liaison carried out in locales ranging from the pool-house of a secluded suburban estate to gay bars in Manhattan...
...actually thoroughly predictable and calculated. Watching Silver Streak is like leaning out a moving train window and looking ahead: you can see everything coming a mile off. The prospect is not entirely pleasant either. Besides the dialogue, which sounds like counsel from "The Playboy Adviser," the twists of plot have been extensively mapped by previous train thrillers, from The Lady Vanishes to Gary Grant's interlude aboard the Twentieth Century Limited in North by Northwest. Director Arthur Hiller (Love Story) and Scenarist Colin Higgins (Harold and Maude) are simply following along the tracks...
...villains led by a well-tailored richie called Devereau (Patrick McGoohan), who is embroiled in an unlikely scheme to protect his art forgeries. Suspense movies are not supposed to make perfect sense, but it is always nice when they come close. Hiller and Higgins toy with sorting out the plot only for the sake of appearances and waste a good deal of energy reaching for laughs. The result is compounded confusion, relieved only by one novel touch. This must be the first train movie in which the hero keeps getting thrown off the train. It is a nice gag, which...
Unconquerable Force. Promising as all this may sound, it becomes apparent after the first few moments that the movie is going to remain stubbornly earthbound. The effects are scanty, the drama gloomy, the philosophy of the film thick as a cloud of ozone. The plot is not all that original either. All through the seemingly ceaseless running time - nearly 2½ hours, and considerably trimmed from the Russian version - one is put longingly in mind of Forbidden Planet. A lightheaded piece of American scifi, Forbidden Planet (1956) was a genial reworking of The Tempest in which some American astronauts were...
...Seven Percent Solution shows that you can. It proves once again that fine actors and an ingenious plot do not necessarily make a good movie. The very cleverness of the movie's conception proves its undoing. Director Herbert Ross concentrates so much on conveying subtle layers of correspondences and contrasts that the movie is ultimately stifled by them. One is meant to enjoy all the delicate ironies of the situation presented, but because the movie consists of nothing more, it ends up being tedious. It suffers, we suffer, from the detached way in which scenes and situations are presented...