In Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, for instance, Dame May Whitty's absence on a continental train is first falsely explained and then happily resolved.
All is happily resolved, of course (for 10 up) In Factory of Shadows (Hodder £4.99, pp150) Thomas Bloor has produced another surreal, blackly comic adventure with wonderfully eccentric characters.
Tom returns early to town, happily resolved on this course, but when he arrives at Dora's house he finds she is not alone.
His great talents and his great desires, his will to create and his will to control, came into conflict — a conflict which, judging from his recent remarks, he hasn't happily resolved to this day.
Bruce G. Sundlun, a former Democratic governor of Rhode Island whose tenure was marked by dramatic events both public and private, including a statewide banking crisis on his first day in office and a lawsuit — happily resolved — by a Midwestern teenager who said she was his daughter, died on Thursday at his home in Jamestown, R.I.
Before everything is -- believe it or not -- happily resolved, the parachutists will land off course and find themselves in the clutches of a menacing hermit who offers to direct the father to civilization if he will leave behind the woman who jumped with him.
Drunk people are so willing to hang their fellow drunkards out to dry, happily resolving they can't/won't recover from here.
Though it culminates with an open-and-shut murder, or so it seems, the mysteries of "A Girl Cut in Two" happily never resolve.
In more recent plays based on local history and on contemporary events, the assumption of cosmic harmony has been muted, and emphasis has shifted to depicting human conflicts nationalist versus Western colonialist, modern daughter versus conservative parents, for example that may or may not resolve happily.
But more times than not, such incidents end up being resolved happily.
