Word: plotlessness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...volume into far too slim a play. The book's small-town vignettes shocked readers in 1919 with insights into the neurotic crochets of lonely, frustrated Winesburghers. No longer shocking, it has been smoothed by the years into a piece of rural nostalgia, but it is still a plotless set of fragments unified by little more than the author's tone of voice and a mood of isolated lives. For dramatic focus, Adapter Sergel forfeited the rich multiplicity of characters, fastened upon the struggle of ailing Elizabeth Willard (Dorothy McGuire) to free her sensitive if needed son George...
...Disney. Mooltiki is a kind of reluctant dragon among lady elephants. She rumbles and grumbles audibly while stoking the mighty campfire with logs. She would rather blow bubbles in the river or clutch a flower in her trunk than be a proper beast of burden. Around Mooltiki's plotless existence revolve a skin-prickling tiger hunt and Author Godden's evocations of the lush tropical fecundities of Indian jungle country. Rumer Godden is a fastidious craftsman but a trifle hammy. Some of her sentences preen themselves so long before the mirror of sensibility that, like Mooltiki, they never...
...power to make one live episodes which could not happen; Zachary Scott's Dimitrios is more smooth, and more thoroughly lousey than an international weasel could be. Each character plays his part with a light hearted desperation one can revel in for an hour and a half of a plotless day Escape...
...second part is McHugh's A Minute's Wait. McHugh is less well-known than O'Connor and Lady Gregory, and his play is the slightest of the three. It is a plotless romp around a rural railroad station, and can best be described as fifteen Irish Alec Guinesses, turned loose in front of a camera. Good fun, and a fine contrast to the somber opening of the final piece...
...sketch scene where mehitabel, as a dramatic-school tyro, suddenly gives the hot-jazz treatment to Shakespeare-Shinbone Alley is attractive show business. And Eartha Kitt. with her feline grace and mannered charm, is frequently mehitabelish, and at the worst gives Kitt for cat. But the show's plotless proceedings have little episodic lift, the score is unexciting and the dancing dated, and Eddie Bracken's archy seems understandably forlorn...