Word: melodrama
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Ayres based Rich and Famous on the Van Druen play, Old Acquaintance, also the title of the 1940s melodrama based on it which started Bette Davis and Miriam Hopks. In its newest incarnation, Ayres supposedly follows the two women, here, Bisset and Candace Bergen as her best friend, Merry Noel Blake, from their college days in '59 up through 1981. It traces their literary careers and sexual histories up to apparent collective midlife decisions to reject men as anything other than sexual toys and to reject their own work. Ayres clutters the original melodrama at side issues like the effect...
...business of this intricately designed yet simply stated movie is to turn obsession into irony. This is always a useful enterprise. In life, it is the great antidote to insomnia; in movies, it is the alternative to melodrama and an excess of gunshots in the final reel...
...That melodrama in miniature was a way of saying that the President is still ready and willing to fight for the principal goals of his economic program. In a 30-minute televised speech to the nation last Thursday, Reagan outlined a second phase of that program, asking Congress to prescribe $ 13 billion more in cuts from the budget for fiscal 1982, mainly from social programs. He also proposed to raise $3 billion more in revenue next year by eliminating certain tax loopholes that hie called "obsolete incentives...
...matinee, 4½ in the evening?will leave the theater in a state very like rapture. This feeling of giddy awe comes partly from spending a day mesmerized by a brilliant troupe of actors, partly from the seductive effulgence of stagecraft, partly from the simultaneous tugs of farce and melodrama, laughter and tears...
...Crummies: The Americans are much devoted to grand gestures and the melodrama. (Leaning toward Nicholas with a stage whisper) And I have it on the best authority that they will pay ... almost anything...