Word: melodrama
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...still screening rather than mirroring the war, Broadway clicked with only one world-minded play, A Bell for Adano. One possible reason was the silence of the better serious dramatists-Robert E. Sherwood, Lillian Hellman, Maxwell Anderson, S. N. Behrman, Clifford Odets, Elmer Rice. There was no good melodrama, either...
That's the Spirit (Universal) climbs likably if loutishly aboard one of the only two "trends" discernible in rudderless current movies. Like Wonder Man and Where Do We Go From Here?, it is a comic fantasy. (The other trend, well represented by Conflict-see above-is crime melodrama with Freudian parsley...
Like all Val Lewton productions, The Body Snatcher shows a humane sincerity and a devotion to good cinema unfortunately rather rare in U.S. movies. In this case, however, much of the picture is more literary than lively and neglects its crass possibilities as melodrama. The exceptions provide an anthology of eminently nasty creeps and jolts. The sudden snort of a horse is timed to scare the daylights out of you; there is a grisly shot of Lugosi's slaughtered head, distorted beneath brine ; and the last passage in the picture is as all-out, hair-raising a climax...
...elderly couple and two of his associates; and how at last his girl betrayed him to G-men, who shot him down as he walked out of a nickelodeon. Fortunately, this old-fashioned story is told in an old-fashioned way. The result: a tough, tight, tense, tricky little melodrama...
...Should Bother . . ." The authors of Dillinger, both 30, are lean, bespectacled Philip Yordan and ebullient, jut-chinned William Castle, whose melodrama When Strangers Marry (which Castle directed as well as coauthored) was so well liked by carriage-trade critics last fall that it is soon to be rereleased. Of these white-haired boys, the one that shines the brighter in the terms Hollywood best understands is Yordan. Reason: Yordan is already up to his ears in the jackpot...