Word: subplots
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Dall and Conrad avoid making Sally's fate obvious by the introduction of unpredictable elements and a dynamic tension created by a slowly emerging subplot. The calculated use of humor prevents the story line from lapsing into static dramatic inevitability. Conrad and Dall frequently objectify Sally's viewpoint by allowing her to comment upon what has happened, or what is occurring within a given shot. While the image remains intact, her voice, satirizing the dramatic situation or directly addressing the audience, comes from off the screen. She second-guesses our reading of the film ("I'll bet you're saying...
...basis for a taut, lurid little film noir, but this adaptation is as plodding and routine as most police work-or as a police novel unredeemed by narrative surprises or a galvanic prose style. The plot doubles back on itself and wanders off on pointless tangents. A subplot involving Delaney's critically ill wife (Faye Dunaway) is never integrated into the manhunt story, and Dunaway is wasted in a role that keeps her flat on her back. Mostly, she is forgotten as the gumshoe and the hobnail boots approach each other for the climactic confrontation. But Delaney is never...
...problems with this subplot transcend technical incompetency, however: the treatment of the race problem is offensive. The Blacks in the film are ridiculously stereotyped; Toomer, known as a "boy," even to young Meechum, who is portrayed as one of Toomer's closest friends; Toomer's mother, an enormous Black woman who loves her job as a maid, and is obsequious in her gratitude toward Mee chum for going out late one night to help Toomer defend himself against some local budding Klansmen. Carlino destroys the impact of the protest against the treatment of Blacks by portraying the grateful nigger, grateful...
...father's unmarried sister adores the mother's unmarried brother. That subplot should underline the tightness of this family circle, but in this production, it comes across as merely silly. Sarah Sewall, as the spinster aunt, falls into the obvious danger of mawkishness. She lavishes devotion on her brother's children and her sister-in-law's brother too ostentatiously. And, like Evans, Sewall does not move like a middle-aged woman. Her counterpart is much better. Genuinely funny as the incorrigible uncle, the drunken wastrel, one wishes Jonathan David Lemkin appeared more often...
...flexibility of the screen allows Simon to integrate more smoothly than he did onstage a broadly comic subplot in which Joe Bologna, playing a brother, and Valerie Harper, as a best friend, fail to have an extramarital affair. Simon does not think much of those; commitments are the basis for the order he believes to be a personal and social necessity...