Word: melodrama
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...characters who people Truffaut's film all attempt to carry on in the theater within this muffled and surreal atmosphere. The Theatre Montmartre, despite its trouble with censors and with its owner underground because he is a Jew, is rehearsing a production of an insipid Norwegian melodrama entitled "The Disappearance." The play has to be inspidid to please the censors and a certain Daxiat, a collaborating theater critic who speaks the language of civility and art but whose reviews are rabid diatribes, poison pen letters under the guise of apolitical culture. As the troupe carries on rehearsals of the play...
...against this background, Truffaut does no more than create a melodrama himself. Essentially, the film follows characters one ostensibly knows about--the resistance fighters, the underground populace--but Truffaut refuses to examine their motivation. Despite remarkable performances by Catherine Deneuve as Mrs. Steiner, and Gerald Depardieu as the leading man turned resistance fighter, Truffaut refuses to follow any one character beyond the confines of their theater. And in the end, when Truffaut resorts to a cliched surprise ending, he undoes any unnerving elements that have gone before. The film is forever on the verge of going deeper, of pulling something...
...special poignance clings to the critic's plea, so reasonable only 16 years ago. Today the option of silence is lost in the collision of melodrama and documentary. The Holocaust has been the subject of a top-rated TV miniseries, of William Styron's bestseller Sophie's Choice, Lina Wertmuller's film Seven Beauties and Arthur Miller's melodrama Playing for Time, of countless paperbacks tastefully decorated with barbed-wire designs. Funds are currently being solicited for the Simon Wiesenthal Holocaust project in Los Angeles: "This multiscreen, multichannel sound, audiovisual experience of the Holocaust will...
...heat of this debate, neither group has realized the obvious: that Fort Apache, in a cinematic context, is an awful film. The movie fails on almost every artistic and technical level. Muddled, sloppy, and usually just silly, the movie plods clumsily from Starsky and Hutch-type melodrama to confused social commentary to moronic musings on the decline and fall of modern civilization...
Many of Bowen's stories were influenced by the work of Henry James and Virginia Woolf. What saves them from the pallid artiness of imitation is the author's taste for melodrama. She knows how to slip in the bizarre or improbable for the purpose of raising expectations, not eyebrows. Ghosts walk in some of these tales, and they are not explained away as wandering, ectoplasmic neuroses. They are what they are. Bowen's fiction is sometimes as strange as truth. In The Evil That Men Do-, a bored housewife writes a love letter...