Word: plotlessness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Despite its manifold wit and moments of wisdom, the plotless Heartbreak House drifts along with its people, and at times reflects their languor. This is partly because Shaw's ante-bellum England is not in itself a theme, but only a framework for one. Where Chekhov portrayed something dramatic, the death-indeed the suicide-of a class, Shaw caught, at most, the malaise of a country. Moreover, his characters are all so busy explaining what they suffer from that though they convey a forcible sense of diagnosis, they give off only the most feeble sense of disease...
Balanchine's plotless episodes were set to later, drier Webern-music that chattered, squeaked, moaned and repeatedly died away in cacophonous little cries. Dance matched music with some wonderfully inventive and often funny sequences of movement. In one pas de deux (set to Five Pieces, Opus 10), Balanchine has a man and a woman approach each other time and again in an elaborate effort to embrace, only to have a final miscalculation leaving them clutching at air. Vastly different in their approaches, both Balanchine and Graham were remarkably successful at illuminating Webern's sparse, mostly atonal scores-perhaps...
...reform him; they fail, of course. He makes sausages out of plastic hose at the plant, devastates their garden party, and transports their son on his fuming motorbike. The characters, in their smug posturings and ridiculous appearance, are like cartoon characters, as the film itself is a plotless continuity of cartoon-like situations. It is one of the funniest bunches of cartoons ever assembled...
...three of the nine one-acters that make up Noel Coward's Tonight at 8:30. They did well with Ways and Means, a bedroom comedy complete with burglar. But why did they omit the final line? Without it, the end fell flat. Hands Across the Sea is a plotless bit of mayhem, a three-minute joke extended to thirty. Shadow Play is a confused, stylized soap opera about a marriage on the rocks. It showed that the two stars ought not to sing in public; but it did provide a good final examination for the lighting technicians and stagehands...
...curtain-raiser is Hands Across the Sea, a plotless bit of mayhem in which the lady of the house doesn't want to admit that she can't identify all her drawing-room callers. Too much time is spent talking on the telephone, and the device of having two or three people talk at once is vastly overworked. It is a three-minute joke extended to thirty...