Word: melodrama
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Judge. In his story of Cortés, Pizarro and the other conquistadors-Balboa, Coronado, Ponce de Leon, De Soto-Author Descola gives not only gaudy melodrama but also psychological insights, which make the figures on this great tapestry emerge as living men. In the end it was the Dominican, Las Casas, the "Apostle of the Indies," who judged the conquistador's pride. A conquistador himself before he entered his order, he served as a bishop in Mexico and bitterly fought against Spanish officials for the abolition of slavery; history has vindicated his demand that the conquered has equal...
...potentially fascinating problem of how a once-great man, three times almost President, would feel after an ignominious, even ridiculous, defeat. The collapse is only one example of the playwrights' constant tendency to avoid exploring deep, if difficult, human problems by escaping to the simple antitheses and effects of melodrama...
Rigoletto, despite some of the most grippingly grisly melodrama in grand opera, is distinctly dated. Whenever Gilda has a spare moment, the orchestra lapses into a kind of soft-shoe accompaniment, leaving wide-open spaces for her graceful vocal glides and glitters. Soprano Dobbs sounded smooth as cashmere beside the tweedy textures of Tenor Jan Peerce and Baritone Leonard Warren. Her phrasing was always neat and true; in lyrical passages her voice floated with never an edge. In Verdi's showy old coloratura bits, e.g., Caro Nome, it glittered clear and bright as a glockenspiel in a football band...
Producer-Director Wyler had good reason to draw a comparison. Rummaging through his musty attic of past hits (Mrs. Miniver, The Best Years of Our Lives, Roman Holiday), he came across Somerset Maugham's durable old (1927) melodrama, The Letter, and last week dusted it off for the 21-inch screen. It was Wyler's first stab at TV, and the result was a slick, highly polished teledrama about a bored wife who riddles her lover with bullets and gets away with...
...general a problem Rattigan is stating, the lines he employs would, for he is quite explicit. Perhaps too explicit, for in the second play the invalid daughter is so weak as to be dramatically unexciting. She inspires only pity. As a result, the second play becomes almost a melodrama, with the forces of good and evil lined up like the liberals and McCarthy. But this explicitness does allow Rattigan free play to realize many aspects of the problem...