Word: melodrama
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...several crucial points this essentially psychological melodrama becomes dubious through overtheatricality, but overall it is searching and persuasive well beyond the usual attempt of films. The picture is also a very considerable cinematic tour de force, comparable with Hitchcock's Life boat and in some ways even harder...
...white opium poppies burst into bloom last week in the barren mountains of Northwest Mexico, setting the stage for melodrama. Troops rode through the hidden valleys, determined to stop the opium harvest. But the contraband harvesters, brown farmers and shepherds, bent on sharing the highest dope prices in history from over the border, eluded the soldiers...
...THUNDER - Frederic Prokosch - Harper ($2.50). Once again the author of The Conspirators silkily mixes mysticism and melodrama in an allegorical account of an underground agent's mission. In search of the spiritual dry rot besetting occupied France, the agent, Jean-Nicolas Martin, finds meaning for his own life in the love of a darkly beautiful Italian miss...
Chicago, which saw some 50 performances of Frankie and Johnnie as a WPA Federal Theater project, had pronounced it a "wow" and as "native as a ballgame." Eastern balletomanes, seeing it for the first time last week, plunged into heated controversy about the strutting, nonclassical acrobatics and gun-toting melodrama. Critics couldn't agree on whether it was "good, lusty folklore" or merely a "dirty show...
Patrick Hamilton, creator of "Angel Street," wrote a plausible psychological murder in "Hangover Square." Hollywood's "Hangover Square" tries hard to be a big, had horror picture, and it would probably not have succumbed to maudlin melodrama in the grips of the original story...