Word: melodrama
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...growing inside you, naturally." Tavernier has dared to find his new film's style in the cool, dark colors and loping harmonics of bebop, and especially in the laconic tempo of Gordon's speech and walk. Gordon, whose only previous movie gig was a stroll-on in the 1955 melodrama Unchained, commands the screen with the dignity of an exhausted emperor. He mines humor from his fastidious diction, has a ponderous grace and takes pauses that could drive Pinter nuts with impatience. No trained actor could have delivered this performance. For it is not so much a performance...
...structure of Marsha Norman's Pulitzer-prizewinning play was pure melodrama. An unhappy fortyish woman announces to her mother that she intends to take her own life that evening; the older woman tries many stratagems to avert the plan but fails in all of them. Improbable as this plot was, it permitted Norman to explore with sensitivity a dramatically less riveting, emotionally more subtle matter: an archetypally vexatious mother-daughter relationship. In adapting play to screen, Norman and Director Tom Moore have been somewhat undone by their new medium's imperatives. The realism of camera close-ups turns probability into...
...nation's foremost dramatists -- the likes of Thornton Wilder, Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams and the early Edward Albee -- only Arthur Miller has consistently reached out beyond domestic grief to comment on public life. For that aspiration, Miller has often been rebuked and advised to return to family melodrama. Probably no rejection hurt more than the fate of his The American Clock, a poignant panorama of what the 1930s did to the country's psyche; it opened on Broadway in November 1980 and lasted barely two weeks. Miller has not brought a new play there since...
...last time Joan Collins saw Paris was during the winter of '86 in the CBS mini-series Sins, which TV Guide last week dubbed the worst in its category last season. Undaunted, she is returning to France in the four-hour World War II melodrama Monte Carlo for the same network. This time she plays a Russian- born singer out to avenge her slain husband. She becomes a seductress-spy, inducing enemy generals to reveal war secrets. Not content with being the star and co-executive producer, Collins, 53, makes her singing debut, rendering The Last Time I Saw Paris...
Lady Jane, her first film, is no formula flick, but an ambitious costume melodrama about the violent period after the deaths of Henry VIII (in 1547) and, six years later, his sickly young son Edward VI. Nevertheless--castles, moats, 16th century costumes and all--the film sinks at its worst moments to the level of teenage fantasy. Bonham Carter, small and dark haired, with huge brown eyes and a face that suggests a miniature in an antique locket, plays the doomed Lady Jane Grey, who lost her life at 16 in an attempt to prevent Henry's Catholic daughter Mary...