Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...over 400 novels and creator of the diffident Commissaire Maigret of the Quai des Orfevres Criminal Brigade. His first novel, which appeared in 1923, was written in one week to meet a publisher's deadline, and in succeeding years he has never deviated from that schedule, nor from the plot format he first laid down. This methodical grinding out of thrillers has made him the best-selling French author ever, a kind of freak of technique in the publishing world, and has earned him millions. But, quite unexpectedly in 1973, he announced he would retire from fiction to work...
...Levin has other ideas. In The Boys from Brazil, he pulls 64-year-old Mengele out of shady retirement to play a grotesque caricature of himself. As he did in Rosemary's Baby, Levin bases his new plot on a perversion of planned parenthood. This time the mumbo jumbo of the occult has been replaced by the gizmos of science fiction...
...weeks end, Balsam said his petition had already received nearly 300 signatures, and that "things will really begin happening" next week. Meanwhile, Holcombe says, he will continue to plot his strategy and, in his words, "find myself a soapbox and holler...
Foreign Correspondent, quite simply, is a knockout. It contains one of Hitchcock's most amazing technical achievements, shooting a plane crash into the ocean from the inside, and one of his best plot clues, involving counter-clockwise windmills. One is again reminded, in this film, of Hitchcock's theory that the best way to make a screen villain memorably terrifying is to make him likeable, and the wonderful British actor Herbert Marshall is, in Foreign Correspondent perhaps the most likeable of all Hitchcock's malfeasants...
Attempts to supplement the wooden plot are ineffective. Flashbacks to the past lives of the six doomed men are too brief and superficial to seem anything but awkward. Glimpses of the judges' private lives serve only to show how little we know about them. So not only does the narrative sag badly, but the characters never rise above the level of faces in an important crowd. If Costa-Gavras could have involved the audience intimately by showing what happens in the judges' minds to cause their attitudes of collaboration--the events of injustice would have taken on a more human...