Word: docudramas
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Speaking at a Law School Forum on the "Atlanta Child Murders," the title of an upcoming CBS docudrama based on the case, attorney Alvin Binder presented lengthy arguments that unfair evidence was brought against Williams when he was convicted of killing...
...boils over nonstop in this superheated political romance; Andrzej Wajda sees to that. From his first features (the 1950s trilogy comprising A Generation, Kanaland Ashes and Diamonds) to the 1981 Man of Iron, an incendiary docudrama about the Solidarity movement, this Polish director has always made movies as if he believed that craft was an impediment to emotion and subtlety the last refuge of an artistic quisling. His hurtling, bullying camera captures characters in heat or dancing on the barricades taunting their Soviet godfathers. But it takes a strong subject not to be overwhelmed by Wajda's scenery-chewing...
...docudrama's portrayal of Soviet life is unconvincing, especially after the flavorful re-creations in such recent films as Gorky Park and Moscow on the Hudson. Its aspirations to realism are frequently betrayed by melodramatics. KGB agents seem to lurk behind every door, like B-movie heavies. But when a witness at a political trial surreptitiously slips a sheaf of documents to Sakharov just before taking the stand, the action is miraculously unseen by any of the guards in the crowded courtroom...
James Reston Jr., a journalist who chronicled the Jonestown story in his 1981 book Our Father Who Art in Hell, collaborated on the drama with Trinity Artistic Director Adrian Hall. The result is a some times unwieldy mélange of docudrama, sociological argument, fragmented monologues and musical interludes. This stylization moves the play closer to Brechtian irony than to Greek tragedy. Jones, played with grim conviction by Richard Kneeland, is not a satanic Pied Piper but a drug-addicted preacher with delusions of grandeur. His followers are not pathetic flotsam but all too recognizable products...
...great credit, Concealed Enemies, a four-hour, three-part docudrama in PBS'S American Playhouse series, clears away much of that baggage and concentrates instead on one of the most fascinating political mystery stories of the century. The drama, with script by British Playwright Hugh Whitemore, begins on Aug. 3, 1948, the day that Chambers electrified a HUAC hearing by naming Hiss as a Communist. Chambers by then had been out of the Communist Party for ten years, and was working as a senior editor for TIME. The climax is set in a courtroom almost 18 months later, when...