Word: plotting
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...film's plot unfolds in the twin towns of Altenstadt and Neuburg, on either side of the Elbe, in the Soviet and American zones of Germany. One dramatic shot shows Russians and Americans meeting on the Elbe, with Russian guns grimly pointed westward. The hard-working Russian hero, Major Nikita Kuzmin, is a glaring contrast to the American Major James Hill, an amiable good-for-nothing who carries a bottle of Black & White Scotch in his hip pocket, and tries to involve his highminded Russian opposite number in "some kind of a little deal" on the black market...
...death-bed. That is the way things are as Marcel Pagnol begins "Cesar," the last part of his celebrated French trilogy of the Marsailles waterfront folks. "Marius" and "Fanny," the other two films dealing with the people, were perhaps funnier, for "Cesar" is more concerned with plot and its happy ending...
Sleeping Car to Trieste (Rank; Eagle Lion) has plenty of plot, but hardly enough steam to keep it moving. Like most British suspense films involving a train with a Balkan destination, it is compounded of political assassination and intrigue, seasoned with romantic love and good-natured kidding of British innocents abroad...
...story turns on an ambassador's diary, which is stolen from a Paris embassy and concealed aboard the Paris-Trieste-Zagreb express. As the train rushes on through the night, the plot drags tediously from one compartment to another, deliberately involving a whole gallery of British tintypes, a sprinkling of Frenchmen and a lone American G.I. In the resultant overcrowding, both action and suspense are very nearly suffocated. Following in a long line of brilliant British thrillers-on-wheels (e.g., Night Train, The Lady Vanishes), Sleeping Car rides at the end of a slow freight...
...simple and delicate story of "Torment" is given an over-all gentle treatment that, by usual film standards, could be said to drag at times. However, the producers deserve commendations for not playing up the sensational elements offered in the plot (leaving that, it would seem, to the able American press agents). "Torment" is the first intelligent filming of a non-idyllic adolescent love affair, I've seen...