Word: melodrama
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Violence (M-G-M), a realistic, tight-knit study in fear, hatred and revenge, is a well-made movie melodrama. Director Fred (The Search) Zinneman, who gets as much power out of his lens as if it were a fire-hose nozzle, deals this time with a deadly game of hide & seek. The fugitive is an ex-bomber pilot (Van Heflin) who once betrayed a group of fellow prisoners to curry favor and food in a Ger man prison camp. Stalking him with a maniacal single-mindedness is Bombardier Robert Ryan, the only survivor...
Except for the paper-thin figure of Ernestina, the novel abounds with brilliantly sketched characters. The prose is bright and economical, and its story is peppered with helpful melodrama. A year and a half ago Author Davidson published The Steeper Cliff, a fine first novel. In The Hour of Truth, he has cleared that dangerous hurdle, the second...
Habsburg Horrors. Mayerling, in Author Lonyay's account, was merely the last act in a psychopathic melodrama peopled, in its main roles, by deeply inbred Central European royalty. Rudolph's mother's cousin and his dearest friend was the mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, who drowned himself. Another dear cousin was an Archduke Otto who once scandalized a fashionable restaurant by turning up dressed only in a sword and the necklace of the Order of the Golden Fleece...
...swift and sometimes brutal melodrama, The Dark Past makes a frank plea for sympathetic understanding, rather than harsh punishment, of young criminals. Smooth performances by Holden and Cobb put the point across without undue sentimentality...
...wrong with the movies, the critics paused long enough last week to pick the ten best of 1948. By week's end, four notable lists' had appeared. Only two films landed on all four lists: Sir Laurence Olivier's monumental Hamlet and Warner's melodrama, Johnny Belinda. 20th Century-Fox's shocker about insanity, The Snake Pit, placed on three lists (its late release missed the deadline for the fourth...