Word: melodrama
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...myself, like Balzac, inquiring after them on my deathbed." Such admiration can be as seductive?and as lethal?as a spy's gentleness. For despite its style and tongue-and-groove plotting, The Honourable Schoolboy sometimes displays a Balzacian tendency to turn urges into passions, to exaggerate expression into melodrama. Moreover, facts, facts, facts are better left to the journalist-reprobates. Le Carré's long suit is not, after all, reportage, but a "second soul" that amplifies the century's dilemmas...
...problem of establishing herself as something more than a luminous satellite remained. Goodbar was especially satisfying as an answer because it is the heaviest kind of melodrama. As is true of so many gifted comedians. Keaton yearns to evoke horror, jerk tears, turn the faces of onlookers pale with fear. "I didn't know if Diane had the range," Goodbar Director Richard Brooks remembers. "And I was thinking, sitting there in my office with her, that she is not exactly what you call a great beauty. Then it struck me that this is who this story is about: a nice...
...parabola of the Porter career is one beloved by backstage biographers. As Brendan Gill's brisk, uncritical Cole showed, the life was filled with laughter, tragedy, a soupçon of scandal and above and below all, money. For unlike the customary theatrical melodrama, Cole's life progressed from riches to riches. Schwartz's Cole Porter is marred by ungainly prose, but its detail is copious and its story irresistible...
...arrangement, it would be a duet for a sax man and a girl singer, but with the soloists in a different key from the band. Smack in the midst of the gold-tinsel snowfalls and the studied unreality of the sound stages, Scorsese spins out a naturalistic, contemporary-feeling melodrama about a love affair that goes sour...
...battleweary German soldiers, the enemy is not so much Russia as the militaristic strain in their own national character, symbolized by Schell's aristocratic captain who dares not face his family until he has won the Iron Cross. The script labors the point with a barrage of melodrama and moralizing. "What will we do after we lose the war?" James Mason asks his cynical, brainy adjutant (David Warner). Replies the adjutant:"Prepare for the next...