Word: melodrama
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Temper the Wind is extremely uneven playwriting and not quite forceful enough theater. It has too many characters to keep it tidy or taut; its clash of viewpoints never quite boils up into drama; its culminating melodrama is clumsily handled and unexciting. But it remains an honest approach to a vital subject. And if it sounds sharp warnings, it offers no smug answers; it is evidence given in the witness box, rather than a resounding verdict handed down from the bench...
...jump the Line" on Browder. Through this period the Editor of the Daily Worker may have been near to getting the goods, but from the standpoint of documentary evidence, he still has to prove that he was not extremely far. It is difficult to swallow cloak-and-dagger melodrama in a land of milk and honey
...Forest is more than just gripping theater. Yet it is not quite large-sized drama. It builds powerfully, but to something not big enough. After such strong-willed people have been locked so long in conflict, there should be some kind of explosion from within themselves. Instead, melodrama is catapulted from without. A tricking-the-trickster that would be just right for rounding off a cold hard comedy about mere knaves is a little short-weight for people as generally base and passionate as they are specifically greedy...
...into a long and brutal film. If you can stand more than an hour of South Sea cruelty on the high seas, you might be able to suffer this--but even discarding the brutality, it has lost most of the documentary qualities of the original in the rush for melodrama. Alan Ladd and Brian Donlevy star...
...corn-colored stock characters of oldtime. Wild West melodrama are on hand. All of them are nicely preserved. Henry Fonda, as the half-reluctant, pistol-packing marshal of booming, lawless Tombstone, could hardly be better. Victor .Mature, who used to wander aimlessly through slick-haired juvenile roles before his 41-month hitch in the Coast Guard, actually does some acting as the dipsomaniac doctor-turned-renegade. Linda Darnell (a brunette for the last time before dyeing her hair honey-blonde to play Amber) is the lushly pretty dance-hall tart...