Word: melodrama
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...this brother of Taylor's who must never be mentioned? Like the audience, Katy has never met .the mysterious relative whose name drives Taylor into queer fits of hysterical reticence. Unlike the audience, she is consumed with curiosity and foreboding about her missing inlaw. Amid some embarrassing melodrama, it begins to look as if Taylor is a scoundrel, maybe a murderer, and-worst fate of all-the short side of a romantic triangle...
Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith's 1915 melodrama featuring Lillian Gish, carpetbagging and Ku Kluxing in the Old South, has been voluntarily shelved by the Museum. Film Library officials, recalling that the picture started race riots in 1915 and again in 1921, admit the "greatness of the film" and "its artistic and historic importance." But because of "the potency of its anti-Negro bias . . . exhibiting it at this time of heightened social tensions cannot be justified." Students are advised that Birth of a Nation is still in the Museum's files and gets "limited circulation...
...lost something, of course; but much of its humor still clicked and much of its melodrama still crackled. It caught the atmosphere of a press room in the days when all reporters were cynics and when Chicago's chief industry was crime. Its profanity had not dated, though it no longer seemed daring...
...movie is no match for the story that inspired it, but it is an exceptionally suspenseful, crisp and lively melodrama, distinguished by shrewd casting and playing, plenty of harsh action, and an extra edge of low-life authenticity. Odd literary note: the Hemingway dialogue, well presented in the film, becomes as strangely formalized on the sound track as heroic couplets...
...thoroughly successful job on Judge Irwin but he did not explode the charge until Stark's son, Tom, got a girl into trouble and political enemies started to use this against Willie. When the charge did go off, it uncovered some strange relationships (and some unnecessary melodrama). Jack's mother and his friends, Adam and Anne Stanton, and a lot of others are drawn into the vortex of events that is the swift and punishing, tragic and surprising last half of this book. It is climaxed by the inevitable assassination of Willie Stark in a corridor...