Word: plotting
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...side, sings songs which are relayed endlessly by the other members of the cast, and in the end marries the princess, as dukes and dowager queens drop away in dead faints. Maurice is a tailor this time and the princess, Jeanette MacDonald, is only a relic French one. The plot is the usual one and the actor is the same, with the varnish and the pronunciation only slightly marred by rough American usage...
...pseudo-philosophical ideas need to be developed with proper kind of dramatic emphasis to be as effective as, for instance, Outward Bound. This one is not. It moves too slowly and its ingenious story idea does not conceal the fact that its authors were so dazzled by their plot that they failed to investigate its possibilities. Warner Baxter performs with the dignity proper to a patriot aware that he is dead. Ablest things in the picture are probably the work of its director, William Dieterle, and the shot of a crowd which has heard about the Captain's demise...
...Still in Athens, last week Samuel Insull, fugitive from justice, gave up cigarets for cigars, swore off coffee. He told the police that he had heard of a kidnap plot being hatched against him in Chicago. Thereafter a carload of fat Athenian police on the lookout for "Chicago gangsters" trailed him. And always close behind him walked swart, stout Peter Vanech of Stamford, Conn., swinging a big stick, scowling ferociously. Wary of Greeks bearing gifts, Samuel Insull shook himself free of a crowd of hangers-on, hired an interpreter. He made numerous visits to the office of American Express...
Aside from the epistemological photography of which Clair is a master, the swaggering, lilting, scurrying action of the plot perambulates the great problem of Society in the Machine Age. The prison and the factory, could any one mistake that parallel? Yet this is a parody that parodies itself. Nothing is taken seriously but the friendship of Louis and Emile, whose adventures in gently inept romance and business melodrama, respectively, run hilariously together: and since this is no very serious matter, either, we are never required to depart from the tone established with such precision in the early scenes. M. Clair...
Combining the marriage, divorce, and remarriage plot that made "Private Lives" such a delightfully uncertain nightmare, "Springtime for Henry" also introduces the libertine bachelor caught in the threes of "a pure love for a pure woman." There are some really excellent opportunities here for wit, satire, and unrestrained nonsense which Benn Levy utilizes to their full possibilities. Free from the elements of moral responsibility, and the philosophy of Bortrand Russell which ruin some very effective comic situations in "Cynara," this farce is not diluted with any common-sense...