Word: melodrama
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...work at a pitch too relentless for real life. But it is the special nature of the theatre to raise emotions to higher power, somewhat simplifying, somewhat exaggerating, but tremendously intensifying. Playwright Hellman makes her plot crouch, coil, dart like a snake; lets her big scenes turn boldly on melodrama. Melodrama has become a word to frighten nice-nelly playwrights with; but, beyond its own power to excite, it can stir up genuine drama of character and will. Like the dramatists of a hardier day, Lillian Hellman knows this, capitalizes on it, brilliantly succeeds...
...publishes his 15th book. Called The Wild Palms (Random House, $2.50), it is a wild, outraged and outrageous novel, which boils over with outlandish humor and grotesque incident. Part of it is a swift story, funny and slightly maddening. Part of it is involved psychological analysis mixed with melodrama, just plain maddening. In most of his previous books Faulkner has written of a mythical Southern town. In The Wild Palms he has a new hero, but he has not left the South. This time his hero is the Mississippi...
...tended to linger long over the achievements of their ancestors as wealth and position slipped away; members of the third generation turned savagely on their parents when they found that the traditions they inherited did not square with the bitter actualities of life. So his books are full of melodrama: the last descendants of old families lie awake in crumbling houses; pompous parents like Mr. Compson deliver half-drunken lectures to their children; elderly spinsters of gentle birth talk hysterical nonsense to impressionable youngsters; young girls creep through the wisteria vines to meet lovers their parents will not accept; young...
Clearly Playwright Shaw's soft-spoken melodrama is a parable of how the gentle souls of the world, taxed too far, rise up and destroy their oppressors, whether neighborhood bullies or world-famed Reichsführers. Put as blithely as Shaw puts it, it is a cheering idea. The trouble is that, while it makes The Gentle People a likable fable, it makes it an absurd play. Humorous mood and melodramatic plot refuse to jell. Murder is usually a fairly serious business, and murder conceived and carried out by two good-natured fishermen should be fairly agonizing. Instead...
...confused with Spawn of the North (TIME, Sept. 5), Warner Bros, dumped 1,500 Ibs. of dye into the studio lake to make it blue enough to serve as a satisfactory Technicolor background for innumerable fights, canoe trips, duellos and hairbreadth escapes of a lively, oldfashioned, fir-tree melodrama. Typical shot: Dick Foran and Russell Simpson wrestling on the edge of a cliff, while Allen Jenkins watches from the underbrush...