Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...midst of a futuristic society that worships a deadly game with indecipherable rules. Quintet appears to be a shotgun marriage between backgammon and Russian roulette. The hero (Paul Newman instead of James Caan) is trying to beat the game before he becomes its bloodied victim. Yet the plot is so familiar that the audience figures out the moves at least an hour before the characters do. By the time the inevitable climax finally arrives, most moviegoers may wish they had stayed at home to watch a truly exciting sport-like, say, The $20,000 Pyramid...
...white inmates. Realism fails partly because some of the principal characters, Chilly among them, are made a bit too likable by the story's occasional tendency to break down into bad guy-good guy situations. But the most important lapse is simply that the workings of the plot, which involves a not very believable escape, make life on the yard too lively...
...policemen and the statutes and terrors that govern their lives, but this casual author makes Sjöwal-Wahlöö look like Ellery Queen. Van de Wetering's novels meander along, with asides on the foibles of human nature and gracefully written filaments of Eastern philosophy. The plot is announced early in the narrative and dispatched at the end as quickly as a victim. The author, 48, was once a Buddhist monk in Japan (he wrote about that arduous life in An Empty Mirror). He returned to The Netherlands, spent some time in the Amsterdam police force...
...aware of the violence in the town and casual cruelty of the hunters. But the book's strongest writing is about the satisfactions of surviving a hard winter: wooden stoves, good drink, a safe journey home made in a blizzard. These are worth more than a tricky plot. Van de Wetering is an amateur who is good enough to get away with...
...must not refrain from calling ageless, stops the clock and the show with a briskly resilient number called A Little Starch Left. An October-October romance between a carpenter (Peter Walker) and a woman (Sylvia Davis) whose husband is hospitalized and dying supplies the musical's bittersweet plot line. At show's end the pair sashay out of the Golden Days to share their sunset years, and on leaving the theater you may find your own step noticeably springier...