Word: subplots
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...plot, such as it is, revolves around a bunch of Chicago hoods, some imported Parisian prostitutes and a precinct's worth of incompetent cops. A love interest is thrown in between the head cop and the chief poule, but all this subplot produces are some melodic but agonizingly uninteresting love songs. Each of the three groups of characters has amusing ensemble bits: the prostitutes form an amazingly synchronized kickline, and the hoods have a funny song about the Apalachin Assassination Association...
Cult of Experience. Hemingway's generation was perhaps the last to find technology romantic. There is an entire subplot liaison between Duc and his Citroën. What with cars and guns, women and wars, the Hemingway hero is always counting his good times on his fingers and telling why they went bad. The great good time in 20th century fiction, and the origin of the fête idea, was the three-day fiesta of the running of the bulls at Pamplona in The Sun Also Rises. Fetes end, Due tells himself, when there is a fall from...
...plotters bided their time (and even put down one subplot to assassinate the Emperor last year). But Haile Selassie's trip to remote Brazil seemed ideal. One morning before dawn the Imperial Guard, led by rebel officers, seized strong points in Addis Ababa, including all communication centers. Asfa Wassan named Imru as Premier and went on the radio to explain that the purpose of the coup was to end "3,000 years of injustice . . . The Ethiopian people have waited patiently to be freed of oppression, poverty and ignorance." The Crown Prince promised to set up a true constitutional monarchy...
Russian Doppelgänger. At one point in the story, an official jeers at an idealist: "You reformers! I suppose you'd like to see a kindly socialism, a free form of slavery . . .?" That is the vision that addles the heads of the two principal characters in the subplot-the student Seryozha and his girl Katya. Seryozha dreams of "a new world Communist and radiant" in which "top wages would be paid to cleaning women. Cabinet ministers would be kept on short rations to make sure of their disinterested motives. Money, torture and thievery would be abolished." Alas...
...pretty much an overgrown boy scout who never experiences the moral struggles that beset the hero of the book. Then, too, the story sometimes lags-not, oddly enough, because it is too long but because it is too short. For the final script, M-G-M eliminated an entire subplot that gives the middle of the story its shape and suspense. But the religious theme is handled with rare restraint and good taste. The face of Christ is never fully revealed. The Sermon on the Mount, The Trial. The Ascent of Calvary and The Crucifixion are pictured, without breathless reverence...