Word: melodrama
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Comedy. The Dies Committee hearings made a rip-roaring Texas melodrama full of spies, plots, trap doors, enemy agents, hairbreadth escapes, made thunderous by howls of pain from the injured, cries of outrage from the accused-a breathless drama of pure Americanism versus nobody quite knew what, packed with sordid procedures, damnable outrages, cries of "Unhand-me-Martin-Dies!" from radicals, and "Let that poor girl go!" from liberals-and all galloping over the cliff at the end of each installment. The Smith Committee hearings were drawing-room comedy...
...Anderson for fit words that his people talk like stilted schoolmasters as well as windy poets : a businessman, for example, refers to gangsters as "banditti." Worst of all, Anderson cannot deal sharply with ideas. The conflict of ideas in Key Largo becomes swamped by emotionalism, ends as a philosophical melodrama where disillusionment is made the villain and idealism the hero...
Fascism v. democracy is their favorite, though only a brand new reader of novels would find anything new on the subject. In the worst of them, Charles Francis Stocking's Out of the Dust (Maestro, Chicago, $2.75), an American in Germany huffs & puffs through an interminable, blowhard melodrama. Frances Parkinson Keyes's The Great Tradition (Messner, $2.50) pictures in drawing room prose the democratic gropings of a German-U. S. aristocrat in Germany and revolutionary Spain. A cut above them is W. Townend's Rescue of Captain Leggatt (Morrow, $2.50), naively melodramatizing the enmity and brotherly reconciliation...
Hollywood glorified the era with miles of film, broadcast the U. S. gangster to the world: Scarface, Manhattan Melodrama, On Wings of Song. Pulp magazines dedicated to crime inundated the newsstands. "Stick 'em up," little boys screamed at one another, "or I'll blow your guts...
...Error (by Clare Boothe; produced by Richard Aldrich & Richard Myers) breaks the jinx on anti-Nazi plays (five in a row flopped last season) by breaking the mold. Playwright Boothe makes everything Nazi-totsy by shifting her scene to the U. S., turning her tale into a lively mystery melodrama, and peppering it with wisecracks like those in The Women and Kiss the Boys Goodbye...