Word: melodrama
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...have made a successful picture from a story as fantastic as James Hilton's Lost Horizon. But as a master of pace, he is certainly no better in his department than England's enormously fat, lethargic Alfred Hitchcock (Thirty-Nine Steps) in the department of nightmarish melodrama. For sheer sentiment he is probably no match for pudgy, high-voiced George Cukor (Camille, Holiday). For action pictures he is topped by John Ford (Hurricane), or Victor Fleming (Captains Courageous, Test Pilot). For capitalizing girlish sweetness at the box office, he is certainly no rival to Viennese Henry Koster, imported...
...somewhat similar results with his hair-raising opus in several of the world's important operatic centres, might have been chastened by this experience. But he was not. Before two years were out, he and his librettist, the late Hugo von Hofmannsthal, had turned out another grisly melodrama, a Freudian version of the Greek tragedy Elektra. In this second blood-curdler, the hag-ridden heroine danced gleefully while the dying screeches of her father's murderers floated from behind the backdrop...
Novel based on the wire service providing race-track information to poolroom bookmakers, with much whipped-up and unconvincing material on the size of the racket, and much melodrama on the attempts of racketeers to get control of it. The best section, telling how dumb Joe Dugan of Kansas City unwittingly beat up a powerful gangster, who thereafter thought the worst mob yet had come to town, is so funny that the rest of the book seems flatter by contrast...
...best, Brighton Rock, a psychological gangster novel, creates an atmosphere as sinister as The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; at its worst it is melodrama with coincidental cracks through which a cat could be thrown with ease. Laid against a background of Brighton Beach, London's Coney Island, the story has for central character a hollow-chested, downy-cheeked 17-year-old called Pinkie, a gangster ascetic who turns killer as a release from slum-made inhibitions: disgust with sex originating with his father and mother, religious neurosis originating with his early ambition...
...Paramount). Underworld melodrama, based on a story by Norman Krasna, directed by Fritz Lang, scored by Kurt Weill, acted by Sylvia Sidney and George Raft which, setting out to prove that Crime Does Not Pay, proves instead that the brightest names in Hollywood sometimes make its dullest pictures...