Word: subplot
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Perhaps most important. Reid manages in a fine Irish fashion to carry a story. All the absurd trivialities of plot and subplot--with IRA goons, federal goons, British goons and even a few goons on personal retainer to the President of the United States, all doing their best to run each other over and muddy the storyline--finally mesh together in Hollywood style. Perhaps the setting makes the book more interesting than it really is: having set his story in Cambridge, Reid takes a name-dropper's perverse delight in alluding regularly to parts of the Harvard campus, which...
...good as they were, necessarily lacked. Tolstoy had originally thought of calling his novel Two Marriages, and a major theme of the book is the contrast between the happily allied Kitty (Caroline Langrishe) and Levin (Robert Swann) and the ill-matched Karenins. The series is able to develop that subplot and prove, so far as Tolstoy was concerned anyway, the thesis of the novel's famous opening sentence: "All happy families are alike, but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion...
When the movie runs into trouble, as it does in the second half, the flaws are those of excess rather than design. Sometimes Spielberg does not know when to stop. A sequence set in India seems to exist only for the sake of one spectacular shot; a confused subplot about an Army cover-up of UFO research looks like a hasty bow to Watergate-era current events; an attenuated mountainside chase has little purpose beyond allowing Spielberg to pay homage to the famous crop-duster and Mount Rushmore sequences of North by Northwest. If any of these elements were removed...
Director Peter Hall, who is head of the National Theater, has staged the play as if he were giving a great banquet in St. Mark's Square. Indeed, Hall's Volpone takes all of three hours and includes a funny but rarely played subplot involving two early English tourists, Sir Politic and Lady Wouldbe...
Hint of Eroticism. There is also a subplot involving Shanks' assistant (Cindy Eilbacker), a perky little number who is killed by some menacing motorcyclists. Shanks, though a timid fellow, manages to do in the villains and reactivate the girl. As she walks toward Shanks haltingly, like a marionette with lumbago, she holds her arms out to embrace him. The scene ends with the girl, who is about old enough to qualify for the junior-varsity cheerleading squad, half dancing with Shanks and half hugging him. There is an unmistakable hint of eroticism here, but Shanks' fantasy ends just...