Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...thriller "American style." It is as if in Chinatown Jack Nicholson only discovered that John Huston had any interest in land just before he shot Faye Dunaway. Nor does the film's shallow social satire allow its all star cast to flourish any more than does the plot. Mastoianni is locked into a dull role as a middle class detective unsure of how to treat the high society Torinisti he is investigation, in particular how to deal with his growing non-professional interest in Jacqueline Bisset. Bisset does not seem half so bored as her constant companion. Trintignant. (who frequently...
...hardly surprising that Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, whatever Norman Lear's original intent, didn't end up as pure parody. Soap operas as a genre already verge on self-parody; the swelling music, anguished faces, mystifying plot complications and sexual entanglements all represent exaggerations of the vicissitudes of life on the other side of the screen. Parodying parody is a difficult business at best, and why bother when you can go parody one up and deliver instead what the New York Times Magazine called "the ultimate slice of life...
Hardly a conventional crime film, The Clockmaker arouses virtually no suspense. We know that Bernard committed the crime; we're only uncertain about his reasons. Because the clockmaker's search for a motive is the only spring that propels the plot, the film sags frequently along the way. Only Noiret's performance keeps us from losing interest entirely as we wait and wait for Bernard to be nabbed or for some new hint about his motive to turn up. Noiret resists any temptation to make Descombes a heroic, larger-than-life figure; he is just a regular guy sweating...
Barry Beckerman's screenplay offers Director J. Lee Thompson (The Guns of Navarone) several good chances to take advantage of the flush, neon lowlife of L.A. Thompson sedulously ignores every opportunity and does not try to sort much sense out of the plot, either. He has all he can do to keep his actors from tripping over corpses. In addition to the ravishing Jacqueline Bisset, who appears as a rather tricky temptress, and Houseman, whose air of hothouse gentility is persuasive, Charles Bronson makes a pleasing shamus out of St. Ives. No big thing, mind. But he eases through...
Many people believe that a book called a novel will offer a group of characters moving along a plot line with something approximating forward momentum. Many are also equally certain that they have heard quite enough, thank you, about the miseries of Manhattan neurotics. Normally, such convictions are not only sound but healthy; when acted upon, they protect the wary reader from a good deal of gibberish and whining. Still, any critical principle worth holding is also worth ignoring if a good occasion arises. Speedboat-a non-novel novel about Manhattan neurotics-is such an occasion...