Word: melodrama
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...movie. Alas, The Outsiders is not quite a good one. Because it falls in with the undulating rhythm of the life of its heroes, for whom a fatal fight and a quiet night have almost equal importance, the picture never manages to reach the peaks of satisfying Hollywood melodrama. Nor are the greasers romanticized enough to be seen as avatars of the outlaw lovers in Frank Borzage's Moonrise or Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night. Like the greasers, The Outsiders often seems to be busily, handsomely going nowhere. Coppola, however, is generous with his fine young...
...boys; there are only bad film makers. When Screenwriter Richard DiLello and Director Rick Rosenthal made this year's film about the tough life of reform-school inmates, they determined to refer not to life but to all the other movies that have preceded them down melodrama's last mile. Sean Penn (memorable as the spaced-out surfer in last year's Fast Times at Ridgemont High) plays the youth who recognizes his own decency and sensitivity about two hours after the audience has been tipped to it. Penn is fine; so are most of his companions...
...especially lucky to have Duvall as his star. Duvall's aging face, a road map of dead ends and dry gulches, can accommodate rage or innocence or any ironic shade in between. As Mac he avoids both melodrama and condescension, finding climaxes in each small step toward rehabilitation, each new responsibility shouldered. With a lot of help from his friends, Duvall makes Tender Mercies the best American movie of the new year...
...presiding over a soap opera, a kind of intricate "Palace Dallas," as the joke now goes in London. Even the birth in June of a healthy baby boy, Prince William, to Charles and Diana did not prevent last year from taking on the quality of sloppily written royal melodrama...
...unfortunately, with Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge. Though Miller strove for Greek myth, his play is more of a tabloid melodrama. A simple stevedore named Eddie (Tony Lo Bianco) in Red Hook, Brooklyn, allows two of his wife's Sicilian relatives, illegally smuggled into the U.S., to live in his home. The younger one, Rodolpho (James Hayden), falls in love with Eddie's orphaned niece, Catherine (Saundra Santiago...