Word: melodrama
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Storm (Universal). Charles Bickford, Preston Foster and Nan Grey in a virile melodrama exhibiting the up-to-date agonies of ocean-going wireless operators...
...characterization or plot, "Brother Rat" does not surprise one by not calling for great acting performances. Nor does, it have them. Not comparing too favorably--with the stage version, probably due in part to the exclusion of the balder parts, it has surges of comedy mixed with surges of melodrama. It deals with attempts to conceal a wife and baby while at V. M. I., to conceal a women in one's room, and to conceal the fact of being out after hours. Wayne Morris as Billy Randolph manages to get the just blame for all these deception,--being...
Heavy, hackneyed, played too slow for melodrama, written too badly for anything else, The Devil Takes a Bride seemed to forget that it was the cast, not the audience, who are supposed to live...
...Fifth Column they can get a good idea. This melodrama of Loyalist counterespionage in Madrid was written last year when Hemingway was a war correspondent in Spain. He wrote it in Madrid's Hotel Florida, between visits to the front 1,500 yards away, hiding the manuscript under his mattress when he was away. In his introduction, Hemingway explains why the play has not been produced: one producer died as he was casting it, another got into financial difficulties...
Many of the scenes of The Fifth Column would make hair-raising melodrama on almost any stage, and the nightmarish confusion in which the whole thing takes place is something new in Hemingway's writing. But it breaks off abruptly just as it gets well under way; Dorothy is such a dunce that an incredibly handsome actress would be necessary to explain her hold on Philip; big scenes-like the shooting of a captured German officer-take place off stage; and all Philip's long explanations of his reasons for aiding the Loyalists prove nothing except that...