Word: melodrama
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Inferior as melodrama, Rose of Washington Square is tops as a vehicle for displaying the talents of two superlative song pluggers. Plugger Jolson, still leather-lunged at 52, blacks his face and shouts
...line of treatment employed by Walter Millis in "The Martial Spirit" was the first definite attempt to relegate the Spanish-American War to the status of a slap-stick melodrama, and this attempt has proved quite successful. Likewise, Mr. Gregory Mason's account of the War has many more characteristics in common with the Gilbert and Sullivan type of opera than with an armed conflict. He has seconded Millis' motion on the subject by treating the 1898 embroilment as a schoolboy's scuffle. But, like many second-the-motions, "Remember the Maine" is at best only a weak reiteration...
Blackwell's Island (Warner Bros.). Gangster melodrama with John Garfield...
Nachman is sacrificed to the OGPU, Author Singer has long ago sacrificed him as a plausible character. As the last third of the story turns into out & out melodrama, even anti-Communist readers are likely to feel that literature as well as Nachman has been the victim of a frame...
Inevitable, apparently, to all such novels is the dash of Latin melodrama at the end. But the book is sharply written, sympathetic without being sentimental; and in conviction, if not in humor, it gains more than it suffers by comparison with Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat, its West Coast counterpart...