Word: melodrama
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...calliope shrieked; the twelve-piece band blared; the popcorn vendors hawked their wares. On stage, the actors hammed their way through Ten Nights in a Barroom. It was melodrama at its drammiest that was being performed in an Ohio river port last week. And that was just the way the professor wanted it. Professor Harry Wright of Ohio's Kent State University had gone to a lot of trouble to get the right atmosphere...
...Margy Shannon of Maujer Street, the plainly dressed, neatly combed daughter of a factory worker, of her loves, job and marriage, the tragedy of her life (her child is born dead), and the beginning of her separation from her husband. It is so flatly written and so free of melodrama (or even of exciting incidents) that its interest is surprising-without plot and without particular distinction in its prose, with characters who seem merely to have wandered on the scene, it is nevertheless absorbing...
...course, that Author Greene shares with some of his readers the sentimental view of Scobie as a hero-without quotation marks. It seems more probable that he tried to write a true tragedy and succeeded in writing a suggestive melodrama, with tragic overtones and ironic implications...
...Largo (Warner), with which Writer-Director John Huston follows Treasure of Sierra Madre (TIME, Feb. 2), is no match for that magnificent picture. But as intelligent melodrama it is very good and as moviemaking it is one of the best pictures of the year...
...Largo has one grave weakness. Through the thinnest possible mask of melodrama, it is trying to speak to everyone in the postwar world who is disheartened; to show how a brave and intelligent man can and must regain reasons for living and for fighting. In this admirable attempt, it succeeds only part way. It may be that gangsters simply cannot be made to symbolize enough...