Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...next Smiley novel, Le Carré is on a Middle East shuttle. Though his plot is still incubating, the author has already uncovered a significant anecdote: "A member of Israeli intelligence told me that he once climbed a telephone pole, snipped the lines on one side with a wirecutter, turned to the other side, severed those?then went down with the telephone pole. A central metaphor for the area...
Moving as this story often is, the film suffers from compression. In the effort to confine the action to a single day, the screenwriters lean on stagy plot contrivances that are endemic to old-fashioned plays. Mastroianni's performance adds another synthetic note: this fine actor works hard, but seems miscast as a defeated and dejected homosexual...
...script does not fit the Gorey formula. Although everyone looks straight out of a Gorey story, you cannot sink your teeth into the paper-thin characters. And unlike his books, you cannot flip through this play. You just have to sit there, watching boring characters witlessly enacting a plot whose ending you already know...
...that fateful meeting in the waning days of the summer of '70. Helms left the White House in the late afternoon with very precise orders from the President: to take any measure short of assassination to stop Chilean president-elect Salvador Allende from taking office later that year, a plot that took on the code name of "Track II." A team player in the best Nixonesque sense of the word, Helms instructed CIA operatives to contact the most powerful elements in the Chilean Right that fall, hoping to pressure Allende's opponents into staging a military coup that would abort...
Raucous vaudeville is Chicago's prime mover. The musical score by Fred Ebb and John Kander so dominates the show that even the musicians tend to dominate the actors, performing on top of a platform which towers over the stage. From there the musicians almost become part of the plot. The bandleader and an MC even stop the proceedings at times to announce a song or plug a performer...