Word: melodrama
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...play is of the crook melodrama type in which someone is robbed of something and in which everyone is supposed to believe the worst of the most patently guiltless person in the cast Miss Wood is picked for the latter role, and if anyone could believe the worst of Miss Wood, except a stage detective and those members of the cast who are supposed to direct the finger of suspicion toward her, that man is a very cynical blackguard. So, if you won't believe the worst of Miss Wood, she tries to make you believe the very best...
...Also, Jack seems just a bit too suave and well-tailored, even in Apache disguise. He fights off a band of Apaches known as "the Pack" while they try to smuggle out of France the secret army plans that nowadays replace the child and the papers in well-built melodrama. It is rather like seeing the head waiter at Sherry's stand off a gang of real tough-mugs from the Bowery. One cannot quite believe it. But one feels properly thrilled at the finish when there is an exciting chase through the clouds that transfers the underworld...
Hence it is hard to tell whether there is any real flesh left on the old bones of this melodrama. Its psychology seems real and substantial as it carries Leah, daughter of the Viennese master thief, through her efforts to rob a French statesman and philanthropist, to her regeneration, achieved with due self-consciousness. In the final act, when Leah leaves her father and his pals, Miss Gahagan, with Jose Ruben, does some of the best acting of the play, and flames out in a final skyrocket burst that makes a good one-act thriller...
...Dust Heap. A Canadian-Northwest melodrama in which the very scenery gets up and acts. In a brothel on the Yukon, the roof pulsates while two men struggle on it, the chimney disgorges a handcuffed hero, a thunderbolt comes right into the room and wrecks everything but the heroine's marcel waves, glass crashes, beams fall, audiences quake. On the opening night, the people sitting in the first row dodged...
Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model. The producers have supplied in Claire Windsor a girl whose looks fit the title róle of Owen Davis's stage thriller of 15 years ago. In other ways they have built up the veracity of the play, so that the old melodrama, with its numerous, complicated and quite mechanical thrills, becomes good fun. In the final shot the producers make it plain that this is playacting, after...