But the subsidiary plot lines were all touching or funny.
Marion Mainwaring has given the semi-tragedy of Laura Testvalley a happy ending belonging to a subsidiary plot; Scorsese, the film finally makes clear, has piously followed the author's intention, a renunciation in the classic French style of Madame de La Fayette's "Princesse de Clèves".
Dating at least back to "Babes in Arms" is the subsidiary plot about a greedy German real estate developer (Paul Schoeffler) and his effete son (Wesley Taylor) who want to raze the Bourbon Room — and the rest of the Strip — to rebuild it along more profitable lines.
Accordingly, he reined in his penchant for showy aphorisms, dispensed with the subsidiary plots and the offstage action, and, crucially, put the plea for help into his characters' behavior, not into their speech.
He noted that: "characters are only skin deep as yet, being subsidiary to the plot, but a successful graft should be achieved during the series".
In my mind, what happens in terms of the plot is subsidiary to what happens in the psyche of the mother, and if the boys were to be the point-of-view characters, the source and sense of horror would shift.
Slicing away the elements of the old script that were not theatrical, and interweaving the subsidiary Gloucester-Edmund-Edgar plot, filched from Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, Shakespeare fashioned his greatest play (some would say the greatest English play ever written), the supreme example of his mature style.
But in that plot, the monarch was subsidiary to the raging of his own brain.
The investigation states that the strike was aimed at the meeting places of militants linked to the Khorasan Group, an al Qaeda subsidiary that the U.S. says is plotting to attack Europe or the U.S. and has described as the most dangerous element in the Syrian conflict.
Set to a deliciously melodic 1882 score by Edouard Lalo, the piece is a kind of ballet joke, employing all the conventions of 19th-century plot and hierarchy: mime, narrative twists, melodramatic occurrences, principal and subsidiary characters, large corps de ballet.
Most full-length animated films give the best material to the subsidiary characters, leaving the heroes to function as straight men charged with moving the plot forward.
