Word: melodrama
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Kissing Bandit (MGM) pokes some good-humored fun at the buskin-and-bluster heroes of costume melodrama. The picture itself is only a costume piece, with a little vaudeville thrown in. Its best features are the broad comedy by J. Carroll Naish, the sentimental songs sung by Frank Sinatra and Kathryn Grayson, and some lively Spanish dances...
...liberator and deliberator. At its strongest, in the well-acted clashes between Denmark and George, the play becomes resonant and vivid. But, itself a slave to history, it sprawls and jerks across twelve years and ten scenes, and, lacking a center, becomes a lumpy mixture of chronicle, drama, melodrama and tragedy. What is most effective is the conflict between the two men, but what arouses most interest is the conflict within one of them. The main trouble is that the play seems "written," that it lacks the body heat of reality...
Back Streets of Paris (Jacques Feyder-Film Rights International). Basically, this is merely a French-made gangster melodrama, but it has some wry Gallic nourishes. Example: the downtrodden Cinderella of the film (Andrée Clement) is not rewarded with the Prince Charming (Jacques Dacqmine), who runs off with a flashy tart. Instead, she gets a profitable little hotel business, and seems perfectly content with the bargain...
Night Has a Thousand Eyes (Paramount), a smooth-surfaced, creaky-jointed melodrama, stars Edward G. Robinson as a vaudeville "mentalist" who finds, to his embarrassment, that his clairvoyant gift is genuine. He feels so helplessly responsible for the catastrophes he foresees that he cannot bear to cash in on his remarkable powers. He disappears into the depths of Los Angeles, leaving his fiancee (Virginia Bruce) to marry his partner (Jerome Cowan). Just as he could predict, Virginia dies in childbirth and Jerome makes money hand over fist...
...convicted Nazi general really guilty? The question stirs some qualms in his idealistic prosecutor, a U.S. Army major (Ray Milland). Major Milland's search for the facts might have turned up some interesting moral issues-or at least some effective melodrama. Instead, there is only a sort of slow-motion cops & robbers chase in an uncertain direction. By the time Milland's search is patly ended, even the realistic backgrounds have begun to take on a phony look...