Word: melodrama
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...Disney and James Bond. But in 1981 there were significant local advances. A low-budget expose of youthful degeneracy in Berlin, Christiane F., became the biggest German moneymaker in the nation's history; and right behind Christiane F. was Das Boot (The Boat), a $12 million U-boat melodrama. Now, these two films and three others are entering American release, with hopes high and cinematic intelligence flaring. Make no mistake: the Germans are here...
...State of Siege, Costa-Gavras turned politics into melodrama; he propelled the Good Leftists and the Bad Rightists into collision so headlong that the moviegoer had little time to ponder the ideology. In The Conformist and 1900, Bernardo Bertolucci turned politics into opera; anyone susceptible to visual grandeur could be swept away by the characters' emotional arias and the camera's delirious glissandos. Now each has made a film about political kidnaping in a turbulent country-Chile in Missing, Italy in Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man-and has approached the subject at a more measured pace. Without...
...have made for a brisk jeremiad on 60 Minutes is stretched to 122 minutes of heroes fuming and villains purring their oleaginous apologies. Spacek and Lemmon, an appealing sweet-and-sour combo, sink in the swamp of good intentions. Perhaps Costa-Gavras should jump back on the locomotive of melodrama. When he stands still, he builds prefab tract houses...
Concentration on the telling detail is a way good writers have of avoiding both melodrama and sentimentality, which blanched the hard truth of Kramer vs. Kramer. As he proved in Melvin and Howard, Bo Goldman is a very good writer, a man whose world appears to be filled with mild eccentrics and funny overheard remarks that he gets down just right in his mental notebook. His specificity seems to have disciplined Alan Parker, who in the past has liked to stress the ugly metaphorical overtones in his material (in Midnight Express he kept insisting that the whole world...
...Heaven traces Arthur's adulterous romance with a baby-faced kindergarten teacher named Eileen Everson (Bernadette Peters), and follows the pair to their eventual downfall when Arthur becomes suspect in a murder. If it weren't for a surprisingly original gimmick, the movie might have just been another lowlife melodrama in the style of The Postman Always Rings Twice. But as the two lovers travel through the bleak Chicago landscape, they occasionally burst into mimicries of the kind of elaborate Busby Berkeley song-and-dance numbers Hollywood so admired during the depression. When Arthur fails to get a loan...