Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Terry Malone will always be mentioned in the same breath with his Stanley Kowalski and Don Vita. The portrayal of Brando's relationship with Eva Marie-Saint's paragon of prudery rankles a bit, sugary in a few embarrassing moments. Yet Elia Kazan's otherwise slick direction salvages the plot, wisely allowing Brando to showcase his still developing talents and heart-melting looks. Studded with a brilliant supporting cast that featured Lee J. Cobb as a tyrannical union boss and Karl Malden as a crusading priest, "On the Waterfront" remains a prototype of movies The Way They Used...
...liners in Richard Benner's brilliant comedy about a female impersonator's rise to stardom and the whacked-out woman behind his success. Craig Russell's unabashedly gay hairdresser has graced us with a character we will not soon forget, completely stealing the show in the movie's plot and the movie itself. His series of famed singers and actresses belting out "Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend" will bring down any house, so carefully honed are his Channings and Ellas. Co-star Hollis McLaren is inevitably overshadowed by Russell's stagewise presence but the delicate treatment she gives...
Just trying to explain the plot of Gondollers, this season's Gilbert and Sullivan production, might have passed the time on that six-hour car trip to New York last weekend better than playing Botticelli. Gondoliers begins simply enough: two Venetian gondolier brothers fall in love with and marry two peasant girls. But then the trouble starts. One of these brothers turns out to be the long-lost king of Barataria, but good Venetian egalitarians that they are, neither of the supposed brothers wants to be the ruler or knows which actually is. All of which gives them good...
Dreyfuss aside, The Goodbye Girl is not without its unpretentious merits, the most notable of which is Neil Simon's script. Though the film relies heavily on the mechanical plot devices of '40s boy-meets-girl movies, Simon keeps gratuitous punch lines to a minimum and shows an open-hearted concern for his fetching characters. Unfortunately, The Goodbye Girl's direction has been entrusted to Herbert Ross (The Turning Point), a film maker who has a bizarre knack for making almost any screenplay look as if it were written for radio. This time around he photographs...
...Christie stints, it is in the discussion of her writing. A few details are vouchsafed: the ideal detective story is 50,000 words long; the short story is not a good form for mysteries; neither is much love interest, nor an overcomplicated midsection of the plot. Her ideas began as a couple of random images: "Girl and not really sister-August." Contrary to popular belief, writing was never easy for the author of 68 books. She fretted for weeks before getting into a novel and required constant expressions of reassurance from Sir Max. "I got very tired, and I also...