Word: melodrama
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Casablanca (Warner). Before the U.S. seizure of Morocco handed Warner Bros. some of the most dazzling promotion in years, Casablanca was just an exotic location for a topical melodrama. The city was known to European refugees as a desperate whistle stop on the underground railway to Lisbon. This picture is about some refugees who were stranded in Casablanca and some of the people who helped or hindered them. Among them...
...visit to the Plymouth sometime in the next few weeks can be justified on the grounds both of entertainment and of education, for "Angel Street" is a well-nigh perfect example of what a cracker-jack cast can do to rescue mediocre melodrama from becoming ridiculous. The play itself is just another mystery, complete with eerily fading gas-lights, a sex-hungry housemaid, and brooches with secret compartments. If read, it would be more an exercise in credulity than an experience in literature...
...Glass Key (Paramount) is the best melodrama since The Maltese Falcon (TIME, Oct. 20, 1941), also based on a Dashiell Hammett shocker. It also clears up any lingering doubts about the status of 29-year-old Alan Ladd. He is the livest thing to turn up in this sort of scarehead since James Cagney in The Public Enemy...
...those rabbits. Mouth open, one paw up, great big eyes, little impressionists running all over the theatre. Take one home in your pocket. What if that sissy, Bambi, is a bore? What if mother-love, the Cruelty of Man, the Landlord of the Forest, and other miscellaneous nineteenth century melodrama are overdone until they become a lush mush? These are Disney's incorrigible faults, but they are well worth suffering or sleeping through for a glimpse of a lop-cared bunny yelling like hell as he slides...
...turned a routine espionage film into one of the fastest, most exciting pictures of the year. Unlike the "Falcon," "Across the Pacific" will not make movie history. Its plot and script, dashed off on a typewriter far less subtle than Dashiel Hammett's, are standardized portions of spy melodrama. The usual number of dead bodies up tortuous alleys combines with some amazingly handy Johnny-on-the-spot acts to make for a film which in other hands might have been only a better than average second feature...