Word: plotlessness
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Hemingway's Snows of Kilimanjaro starts with a terse and inscrutable paragraph about a dead leopard atop a snow-clad African mountain. That paragraph stopped 20th Century Fox dead in its tracks. Faced with the problem of going along with an essentially plotless and often unfathomable character study or scrapping it for a more conventional plot, 20th Century screenwriter solved it by choosing neither and writing in a mass of extras and animals instead. The result is a spectacular mudflat of a film, neither good Hemingway nor good...
...fiction, Ross was never as sure of his touch-or The New Yorker's-as he was on fact. He ceaselessly searched for new authors, helped them develop new ways of telling stories, liked them plotless. But he was not always sure what the often neurotic, atmospheric stories were about. Once he grumbled: "I'm never going to buy another story I don't understand...
...people she loved rushed at her as much for vengeance as for grief, almost like wolves into the circle of a dying fire that had drawn them yet filled them with fear. In a fitful half-light of awareness, the characters of Brendan Gill's soft-moving, almost plotless novel rip tooth & nail at the memory of Elizabeth-at each other for possession of it, and finally each at himself in remorse for the dried smallness of his own loveless heart...
Cheaper by the Dozen (20th Century-Fox] is a movie version of the bestselling based-on-fact book about life with a father of twelve in the 19205. A plotless string of mild, rambling anecdotes, with Clifton ("Belvedere") Webb miscast in the central role, it is not much more fun than leafing through somebody else's family album...
Once again the English have succeeded in turning one joke into an amusing though plotless movie. Although the English are undoubtedly not the world's greatest humorists, they are the masters of the drawing room titter, a talent which is fully exploited in "Tight Little Island...