Word: subplots
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...enunciated with such graceful strength in the set, that although Mr. Benthall puts his actors through all the burps and stumbles common in Shakespearean slapstick (or at least allows them a free hand in this respect), they never seem coarse or even very vigorous. The basis of the comic subplot is the duping of Malvolio, the puritanical steward, by a group of cheerful tosspots--a little joke which has occasionally struck critics as cruel, since Malvolio is at one point chained in a dungeon as a madman. Before Mr. Heeley's backcloth, under Mr. Benthall's guidance, it appears...
...strange: a Byronic Oxford lad, a hopeless lush, a flighty wife named Dora, and her Prussianesque art-scholar husband. In a series of plot maneuvers as complicated as a gavotte, Author Murdoch sees to it that the insiders and the outsiders mix, mate and mangle each other. A lengthy subplot centers on the discovery and raising of the ancient abbey bell, legendarily consigned to the bottom of the lake as a result of a curse on an errant nun. The bell, of course, is a symbol for that clear-ringing innocence of which the colonists are self-deprived...
...mold which has been a success as often as this one. The pattern of musical comedies is nearly always the same. After a fast opening chorus, the romantic male lead meets and wins the romantic female lead, all to the tune of a ballad. Then comes the comic subplot, generally introduced by means of a specialty number. After that, the plot takes over for a while, and by the time the first-act curtain falls, the lovers are parted. The second act, which also opens with a chorus number, is shorter and more sketchy than the first. All that...
There is his agnostic doctor who offers Kansdorf morphine and a mercy killing. The doctor's wife had married him on the rebound when the man she really loved jilted her. This erstwhile suitor in turn became a Dominican friar, and to him Author Stolpe devotes a lengthy subplot. Father Perezcaballero is the bedeviled Graham Greene priest of the mislaid vocation. A brilliant preacher-intellectual, he has every gift but faith, all knowledge but that of the dimensions of his own pride. Brought to an appalled recognition of his vanity and emptiness, Perezcaballero somehow enables the dying Kansdorf...
...electro-shocked back to everyday life. Egmont rather sheepishly admits that maybe man had better develop the mind he has rather than try to lose it in matter. The author's further notion that mental progress is some kind of communal process is underlined by a lengthy subplot about a company strike that contains all the solidarity-forever, to-the-barricades cliches...