Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...film moves through harvest and winter and spring with only a thin thread of plot, recounting every day events along with a few more important ones. The result is that you feel the lives of the people, instead of just seeing them. What at first were lumpy bodies with non-descript faces become as real to you as your roomate through Omni's brilliant creation. The work is all Omni who, besides directing, wrote and filmed Tree. The cast, non-professional, which may account for the subtlety and dignity with which the characters were portrayed. Not once was piety overdrawn...
...film's setting is an idealized Lancashire town where American G.I.s are stationed while waiting to invade the Continent. The plot is Hollywood's ancient love-today-for-tomorrow-we-die formula, taken to the third power: three Yanks of varying rank (Richard Gere, William Devane, Chick Vennera) relentlessly pursue three Englishwomen of varying social status (Lisa Eichhorn, Vanessa Redgrave, Wendy Morgan). Since two of the heroines have home-town heartthrobs fighting overseas, the American interlopers meet with some early but usually temporary setbacks. By the time the movie reaches its climax-an irresistible train station farewell, complete...
Schlesinger enriches Yanks' conventional plot machinations with fine atmospheric details and fetching performances. The movie's locations include quaint shops and pubs, foggy, blacked-out streets, a glorious art deco movie palace and enough green pastures to make even an Irishman go dizzy. Most of the cast accomplish the not inconsiderable feat of standing out against the colorful backdrops. Though Gere at times slips into self-conscious mannerisms, he makes his character, a mess sergeant from Arizona, an appealing innocent abroad. Devane is a charming commanding officer, despite his disconcerting tendency to sound like Jack Nicholson. Both Eichhorn...
...them. Only the Gere-Eichhorn romance is fully told, complete with subsidiary characters (Eichhorn's parents, well acted by Rachel Roberts and Tony Melody). The remaining couples are superficially sketched and add little to the film except length. There are other excesses as well: a thrown-in sub plot about Redgrave's troubled young son, some muddled digressions about British-American cultural conflicts, and a grueling military race riot. Besides wasting time, these intrusions are pretentious; the director seems to be trying to convince himself that Yanks is something more than a tearjerker. In the process, he insults...
...offer Woods a chance to give a splendid performance as a psychopath -jaunty, furious, ingratiating, ignorant and intelligent in bewildering turns.) The film's deliberate piling up of superfluous minutiae tends to have a numbing effect even before the characters get down to the main business of the plot: the murder and its endless afterlife in court...