Word: plotting
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Lady Killer (Warner Brothers) illustrates its makers' theory that a James Cagney picture requires less plot than movement. Starting out as a routine record of the rise of Dan Quigley (James Cagney) in crookdom. Lady Killer abruptly shifts its ground, loses itself in aimless mockery of actors, film directors, newspaper critics. In Hollywood hiding from New York police, Quigley gets a film bit as an Indian chief, becomes a star by subscribing to a stamp-bureau which sends him fan mail from all over the world. Tired of bashing his ladies on the chin. Cagney in this picture drags...
Back we go to the good old days of the world war to discover that one man believed that war was hell and that men were like the rats in Norway which swam to sea and drowned. It is a very interesting, indeed a charming plot. Richard Dix is the virile young humanitarian who hates fighting, but he loves a simple lass who tells him that he is as yellow as yellow chalk. Therefore, he enlists, and we next see him mingling with a group of neurasthenic aviators over there. Once in the war, Rocky Thorne becomes a cruel killer...
PASSIONS SPIN THE PLOT - Vardis Fisher-Caxton & Doubleday, Doran ($2.50). If the last two volumes of his tetralogy are on a par with the first two (In Tragic Life-TIME, July 3; Passions Spin the Plot}. U. S. critics will be speaking of Idaho's Author Vardis Fisher in the same breath with Indiana's Theodore Dreiser. No less doggedly candid than Dreiser but a more artful writer, Author Fisher intends his four-decker novel to be an honest book. Because he has had a hard, unhappy life and because he writes only of what he knows...
...inclined toward mystery movies, you will probably like "From Headquarters." The plot is a complicated but pretty plausible one. It includes plenty of perplexing moments and a noteworthy collection of safecrackers, blackmailers, and dope addicts...
Impossible characters, an unbelievable plot, and complete disregard of the life-work of Margaret Sanger rob the picture of any value as sex-education propaganda. The association of passionate osculation with such things as positive Wasserman reactions and unsanitary abortions is not, however, without effect. The reviewer heard a damsel who had all the earmarks of an inmate of a local institution of higher learning for females remark after the show, "I don't see how a girl could ever want to kiss anyone again after seeing that...