Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This ill-assorted crew succeeds, barely, with the aid of many kind coincidences of plot and blasts of whimsy all lifted from a Donald E. Westlake novel and curdled in shipment. The actors perform with resolute lack of charm. Scott appears to be doing some sort of New Year's party imitation of Humphrey Bogart, an idea that consists entirely of petrifying his upper lip and pressing the dialogue out between the spaces in his teeth. The other members of the cast seem to have dropped by on their way to the unemployment office...
...that Director Champion may have had some notion about making a comedy in which mechanical objects, not actors, are the real farceurs. He mounts elaborate scenes of amuck earthmovers and bizarre automobile chases along the L.A. freeway. But these devices quickly give way to the intractable mechanics of the plot-plan, get the money and split. If a novel approach to such a yarn exists, this exercise is not it. &183; Jay Cocks
Peckinpah means this movie to outrage; it is a kind of calculated insult mixed with generous doses of self-satire. What plot exists centers on a wrecked cocktail pianist named Bennie (Warren Dates), who tickles the ivories in some dive far into the bowels of Mexico. Once long ago Paulette "Goddard came into the joint and requested a tune, but the place has gone downhill since then. Bennie still keeps a bleary lookout for a buck, and his greed and desperation get him hooked into a feudal revenge scheme to track down a certain Alfredo Garcia and separate him from...
...setting is back-lot Moscow. The plot, based on a novel by George Feifer, employs the sort of people who trade in hard currencies and Western jazz records on the famous black market there in a vain effort to relieve the pervading drabness. The thought that the secret police may be crashing round the edges of an East-meets-West romance adds the faintest imaginable flavor of suspense to this bowl of borsch. Actually, the only thing to be said for the locale is that when the Russians find people behaving as tiresomely as Miss Hawn, they haul them into...
When he died in 1971, Nikita Khrushchev was officially a nonperson. Despite his eleven years as Soviet party chief, he was denied the usual honors of burial at the Kremlin Wall and was instead allotted a plot in the far corner of the Novodyevichy Cemetery, Moscow's second-ranking burial ground. The newspapers that had once headlined his speeches identified him in his death notice only as a "pensioner of the state...