Word: melodrama
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Fools in the Dark. Every now and then some producer reaches the absolute end of his dramatic rope and decides to make a melodrama on the theory that old things are best. Accordingly, he stirs up daggers, skeletons, an avalanche, death traps, mystery yachts, a Hindu villain, an airplane rescue. In the present instance, a death ray was included to give that natty modern touch. No matter how often you have been to the cinemas, the incoherent multitude of these manufactured thrills serves a sure purpose. There is an inevitable, if factitious, reaction. Matt Moore and Patsy Ruth Miller assist...
...name in the paper every day. . . . Suppose the telephone directory had a real news item after each name? Wouldn't that make a pretty good newspaper?" So Sallie, heiress, of a town near Chicago, directed a young, sensitive man to build the ideal newspaper. Love and Melodrama interferred. Eventually the young man went to the hospital and Sallie to Europe, but only after they had performed some experiments in journalistic honesty which deserve to become classic...
...roles, played without a flourish, directed by anyone with some feeling for proportion and suspense, make passable pictures. Run them off in a mountainous, shaggy, backwoods setting, make Wallace Beery the villain, Rockcliffe Fellowes the hero, Virginia Valli the heroine, and you may turn out the best deep-chested melodrama of the year. That is what Director Clarence Brown did, the story chosen being that of an honest, overalled signalman and his wife, whose hair-raising vicissitudes, domestic and vocational, are caused by a hulking railroad sheik. Punished once for snatching kisses, this sheik chooses a stormy night...
Sweeney Todd. Rich, ruddy, raucous melodrama, vintage of 1842, in two murderous acts and eight vein-chilling scenes, telling the bloody history of The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, was revived. Wendell Phillips Dodge, producer, calculated (accurately) upon obtaining the same effect as that produced by an old family tintype with the head-clamps showing...
Rich, ruddy, raucous melodrama that produces the same effect as an old family tintype with the head-clamps showing...