Word: melodrama
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...motion picture is a charming combination of satire, whimsy, and melodrama. As Crichton, Kenneth More is proper--yet moving. Cecil Parker is a blusteringly good Lord Loam and Sally Howes is not only beautiful, but acts, too. The adaptation suffers somewhat from an inability to smooth out the entrances and scene changes which are an accepted part of the theater, but unsettling on the screen. The movie's ending was probably more convincing 50 years ago, but is still acceptable. The evening as a whole is quite enjoyable...
...doubt better suited for domestic consumption, is one of the most egregiously bad films to be shown in Cambridge in recent years. The plot is muddled, disjointed, turgid, improbable; the entire production, heavy, unamusing, and completely pointless. It is, in all, a careless potpourri of violence and cheap melodrama interspersed with frequent sex scenes as raw and explicit as the censor will allow...
Thus Heliodorus opens his swashbuckling Ethiopica, one of the ancestors of the historical novel. Even when it first appeared−about A.D.250−it was a full-fledged historical, for Heliodorus was writing about a period 750 years before his own time. This early blood-and-thunder melodrama comes magnificently alive in this new translation by Columbia University's Jay Professor of Greek, Moses Hadas...
This mixture does not succeed on the screen as it might in print. Because the disparate elements remain inconclusive, it is melodrama that emerges most clearly...
Most Southern authors have a marked tendency to breathe harder than other writers, especially when they tackle historical fiction. Out of the huffing and puffing come purple imagery, melodrama of incest and murder, sentence structure as involuted as an express highway cloverleaf. The dividend from this school of writing is that the reader achieves a total immersion in the scene; the danger is that he may drown in words. Fortunately, Author Lytle (of Murfreesboro, Tenn.) comes up for air every now and then, and gets on with his story of life in the Cumberlands of Tennessee during the 1870s...