Word: plotting
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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There isn't any real plot. The book simply deals with the fate of the Sixth Army, intermittently following the adventures of several very different men, and occasionally breaking off into simple narrative. It begins with the nightmare existence of a soldier in one of the notorious punishment companies, a man who has lived through so many years of deaths and explosions land burying details that he scarcely knows whether he is alive himself. As the pressure of Russian attacks forces the German line closer and closer together and the regiments beat their aimless retreat across miles of snow-swept...
...because the crack is funny, which it isn't but, because it gets at what seems to be the basic, ghastly faults in "Allegro"--faults that take a lot of the kick out of the show's occasional very brilliant scenes. These faults are, roughly, the righteousness of the plot and the resulting humorlessness of the Big Scenes. They are bad enough in themselves. What is worse, they give Richard Rodgers situations which require all the major songs to be so heavy and and serious that people leave the theater wishing there had been more bright songs--such as "Mountain...
Unfaithfully Yours often trips over its own snarled plot lines and falls flat. But Rex Harrison gives a sly, buoyant performance in a tough, wordy role. And some of Writer-Director-Producer Sturges' whimsy and brisk dialogue are worth the wait through the dull spots. In a cast heavy with "characters," Edgar Kennedy, Lionel Stander and Rudy Vallee stand out. Vallee is especially good as a stuffed-shirt multimillionaire...
...transplant successfully any play from its original setting to modern times seems go demand that it have either a plot of some universal theme or else a pertinent parallel to the present. The Idler Players obviously felt the latter to be true, which may be so. Counterparts of Mr. Congreve's people certainly do exist today, but the people on the stage at Agassiz are confused and confusing hybrids, standing with one leg in the Seventeenth and one in the Twentieth Century...
There are two additional hardships put upon the audience and the actors by the modernization that possibly did not occur to the Idlers. Modern audiences expect modern plays (as this one now is) to have a plot they can follow or else no plot at all. "The Way of the World" contains the world's most complicated plot: when seeing it done in Restoration style the plot rightly seems of no importance; when it becomes a play of Cafe Society, there is a natural and frustrating inclination to try and figure...