Word: subplots
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...Caravan has a great deal of difficulty with "Cascando." Beckett wrote it as a radio play; the Caravan stages the play with a whole new and confusing subplot, centering around the themes of freedom and release. The three parts of the mind, rather than complementing each other, with this addition instead become opponents in attempts to get across a masking tape line on the stage. When someone does succeed, a yellow light flashes on. This pattern of conflict, coupled with a great deal of unnecessary gesture, buries Beckett's originally spare, vicious play in a mass of directorial obfuscation. David...
...also offers a collection of anecdotes about bulls and bears of the past, which his characters recount with the fervor of Hot Stove League fanatics swapping memories about Willie Mays' catches or Curt Flood's legal problems. Vartan has also unwisely included some love affairs and a subplot about Milliken's revenge on the ex-basketball player who stole his first girl. Alas, it is all too obvious that to Milliken and colleagues, such matters are distractions; the excitement of sex can never equal the blood-pounding tension of making a killing on a big short sale...
Hound's action takes place in a theater on opening night. It is a spoof of an Agatha Christie thriller, and Stoppard handles it with prankish zest, though it lacks the urbane comic polish and spine-prickling tremors that Anthony Shaffer put into his Christie takeoff, Sleuth. The subplot concerns two drama critics who observe and comment on the play and eventually get actively drawn into it at no small risk. Here Stoppard is sly and wry, and one may guess that he views critics with bemused affection and subdued contempt...
...didn't stop to sort out the explanations it threw at you so self-confidently; its intelligence was one of style and atmosphere rather than of intellectual argument. On film, the vision is more focused, less intimidating and also less impressive. For example, the film has traded in the subplot of the German landlady for a far less interesting romance between a Jewish girl, daughter of a Berlin department store owner, and her would-be suitor. The affair is as boring as it is trite, and, if it weren't for the audience's guilt-ridden apprehensions...
...mostly vain attempt to lend substance to these goings-on, there is a subplot involving a romance between a rich Jewish beauty and an impover ished gigolo who is masquerading as an Aryan. There are also solemn but su perficial references to Nazis and inti mations of the holocaust to come...