Word: plot
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...worry about the excesses of plot. A.L. Levine is what this book is all about, and Halberstam's hero rises to beat back any challenge. Levine is a marvelously charming character: a poor Jewish orphan who works his way up from the seediness of the Bronx to the sweaty good times of a travelling salesman in the South, onward into the cushy, three-piece suited life of a millionaire real-estate developer and Democratic Party kingmaker, stopping off in countless bedrooms at every chance. Weaving together flashbacks and scenes from Levine's suddenly conceived campaign for the Presidency, Halberstam chronicles...
...Hardy, the plot takes a dozen improbable turns. When he was a poor young man, Henchard got drunk at a country fair and sold his wife and daughter to a sailor for five guineas. Eighteen years later he is a rich hay and wheat merchant, as well as the mayor of Casterbridge. He is remorseful for his sin, however, and when his wife turns up, the sailor having been lost at sea, he tries to right the old wrong by marrying her again and adopting his own daughter...
...concerned, and Henchard's obsessive fear that his secret may be found out causes him not only to remember the past, but in a sense to repeat it, and the drama unfolds from there. When criticized for his unlikely scenarios, Hardy said that he was interested not in plot but in character. Playing Henchard, Alan Bates adds another finely molded performance to his credits. Strong and weak at the same time, his Henchard has the un stoppable vitality of the attacking bull he wrestles to a standstill in one of the series' most dramatic scenes. The only force...
Bonita wanted the plot to follow the pattern of the original, and anyone who saw that one might be excused for saying, "If you've seen one, you've seen them all." Crusty but kind James Stewart is raising his two orphaned grandchildren in postcard-pretty Northern California. "Oh, golly, gee, I love that home-town feeling," sings Gramps. "People always say hello." Lassie is their pet, and they all spend a lot of time hugging her. Suddenly a baldheaded, mean-looking rich man develops a yen for the dog; she reminds him of his own dead collie, the only...
...cast, and the somewhat reduced chores enhance his appeal. Clouseau still mucks up his vowel sounds and takes a good many falls, but Edwards doesn't labor these gags as much as he did last time. One can hardly call him restrained, but he's comparatively restrained. Admittedly, the plot is harebrained and the climax, set in a fireworks factory, fizzles, but there is a silly, pleasantly ambling denouement in which we are not so much gratelful for what Edwards does as for what he doesn...