Word: melodrama
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...author and director, Ludlam moves the melodrama with ferocious precision; this is high-voltage comedy, not low camp. But it is as an actor that this supernally gifted jacka-napes-of-all-trades shines brightest. All eight roles here (four male, four female) are played by Ludlam and his co-star Everett Quinton, with lightning-quick costume changes and split-personality voice throwing. Quinton as the maid skulks off stage right and 20 seconds later appears at the French doors as Lord Edgar. At the climax, Ludlam's Nicodemus struggles with Ludlam's Lady Enid-a true vaudeville...
However, most of the credit must go to Benton who wrote and directed this somewhat autobiographical tale with customary finesse. Scenes that might have been heavy handed under another's direction are saved from melodrama by Benton's understated humor. When Moses, a born whistler in the dark, looks at the farm devestated by the storm with shutters and doors and broken glass lying everywhere, he says brightly. "Everything's little bent, but it's still here...
...What's it about?" and "Who's in it?" By these standards Places in the Heart is going to appear, at first glance, a bit out of time and place. In outline, the story is inescapably reminiscent of a sentimental silent film or of 19th century theatrical melodrama, telling as it does the simple tale of a plucky Texas widow attempting to save her farm from foreclosure and her family from being broken up should the old homestead go. Indeed, Edna Spalding, as luminously portrayed by Sally Field, is as good as she is brave: churchly, compassionate, guileless...
...plot was as convoluted as any on Dynasty. The tanned, silver-haired protagonist might have just walked off the set of Dallas. But the moment of melodrama at the federal courthouse in Los Angeles last week would have strained credulity on any prime-tune soap opera. Twenty-two months after he was arrested, and five months after his sensationally publicized trial began, renegade Auto Manufacturer John Zachary De Lorean, 59, his hands clasped in front of him as he leaned back in a beige swivel chair, heard a jury of six men and six women declare him not guilty...
Pintilie opts for farce and melodrama...