Word: plotting
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...keyword to both the play and this production is balance. Much Ado, like the other plays in Shakespeare's Renaissance style (as opposed to his Mannerist and Baroque styles), exhibited a good deal of symmetry. The central tragicomic Claudio-Hero plot is balanced by the high comedy of Beatrice and Benedick and the low comedy of Dogberry and Verges. The evil bastard Don John is a foil to his genial legitimate brother Don Pedro; and these young brothers contrast with the older-generation brothers Antonio and Leonato. Don John's two male attendants (Borachio and Conrade) balance. Hero's female...
...balance in the sets and in the play's structure, however, Shakespeare did not achieve balance in the quality of his text. An objective inspection of the script indicates that he seems not to have had his heart in the Claudio-Hero plot he borrowed from elsewhere. His chief achievement in the play are precisely those things he had to invent himself: the witty verbal skirmishing between Beatrice and Benedick, and the portrait of bureaucratic officialdom represented by the malapropistic Dogberry and his sorry crew. (Shaw is about the only person who has denied the wit of the high comedy...
Beatrice and Benedick, then, are far and away the most engrossing personages in the play. And even in productions in which the serious plot is tedious, it is essential that the man and woman who play this sharp-tongued pair be evenly matched--otherwise the result is fatally unbalanced...
...suicide. His integration of subject matter and approach demand this treatment. To critics who see Weekend as the end of the line, one must mention Les Carabiniers, a film that uses moral imbeciles in just the same way to attack war. Its events are as senseless and brutal; its plot as much as skeleton device that barely holds the film together (the characters' journey through alien rural setting becomes very boring); its characters as much figures for the camera to follow, rather than sensibilities whose interaction with a setting must be described. The lack of personal development makes Les Carabiniers...
Bullitt's action-suspense plot is to overloaded with references to political authority's abuse and free action's virtue that one must take this, rather than its ostensible police-protection plot, as the film's subject. Steve McQueen plays a detective lieutenant whose chief shields him from an ambitious politician (Robert Vaughan, played for a straight heavy). The script puts McQueen's responsibility for his job in personal terms--his relations to his chief, battles with his own conscience, personal conduct...