Word: yarns
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...Sellout. In the novel, Mark innocently relays a story that U.S. security agents have concocted with the deliberate purpose of trapping Physicist Bloch in a lapse of loyalty. But the question of why Sebastian indicts his friend with a damaging yarn of his own is only glancingly answered. Chevalier hints that merely working on the A-bomb has corrupted Sebastian's moral sense. Another suggestion is that he has "sold out" to a nebulous power elite and forgotten the "little people." This charge reduces itself to guilt by dissociation: Bloch's crime is not so much libeling...
...Poston, Golden Fleecing is into the second act before it explodes into laughter. Then it expires in the third. Playwright Semple cannot solve the author's great problem of getting his people into trouble while staying out of it himself. He is too laborious tying his yarn in knots, too predictable untying it. Amid Director Abe Burrows' sharp whipcracking, there is too much forced wisecracking; amid a great many antics, there is never quite enough...
North by Northwest. The master's Hitchcockiest yarn in years gives a picture of the CIA that would make any real-life operative laugh his head off; nevertheless, suspense guaranteed. With Gary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason...
...time, and leave itself exposed as the threadbare popular melodrama it technically is." The critic also happened to be the play's author, George Bernard Shaw. Rashly ignoring the warning of a wise old showman, Hollywood has at tempted to put new life into the languid old yarn about shenanigans in Revolutionary War days. The British side (Sir Laurence Olivier) comes off better than the Colonials (Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster...
...motel weekends with married men. The murder victim is a gigolo-like blackmailer. Author Quentin is a skilled carpenter at knocking together a neat puzzle and in sending the reader haring off down a dozen false trails. But it is hard to be sympathetically involved with any of this yarn's not-very-winning people. The attractive character is Lieut. Trant of Homicide, who is "priestlike," gentle, almost sorrowful-and coldly aware of all the damaging facts the suspects are trying to hide...