Word: melodrama
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...husband's love by convincing him to remain true to his principles. When Hepburn plays opposite Cary Grant, we can't totally enjoy her charm because she se ems so manipulative, as in Bringing Up Baby, but here she is a totally sympathetic character without a hint of melodrama, and the result is awesome. Tracy's political program is based on Wendell Wilkie's, but his campaign style conjures up no one more strongly than Jimmy Carter, showing the roots of Carter's methods of being everything to everyone in American political mythology...
...ever worked with"), he disagreed with him about the advisability of fictionalizing the film. He and Pakula were convinced that documentary-like realism was essential to the picture, that they had to develop what Pakula calls "an immediacy, a sense of being there," that would replace conventional melodrama as a means of sustaining interest. He also felt this attention to workaday detail would protect against the picture's "overwhelming potential for pretentiousness...
...Michelangelo Antonioni, Visconti used Sicilian villagers instead of actors in La Terra Trema (1947), the drama of a poor fisherman's family. In Rocco and His Brothers (1960), he described the brutalizing of a farm family moving north to Milan. Visconti's later works tended toward operatic melodrama (The Damned) or slick, vacant, surface beauty (Death in Venice). Conversation Piece, badly received at the New York Film Festival last fall, told the seemingly autobiographical tale of an elderly man of taste and learning trying to embrace the wasted lives of the barbaric sybarites around...
THERE ARE MOMENTS when Inserts seems to aspire to tragedy and others when it verges on absurdist farce. The broadly farcical sequences lighten what might otherwise be a plodding melodrama and heighten the pathos of The Boy Wonder's plight. A contrast is effected between The Boy Wonder's intelligence and dedication to cinematic art, and the foolish self-serving idiocy of the world around him. At one point, Stephen Davies as Rex, dubbed the Wonder Dog, an empty-headed young undertaker with visions of film stardom who moonlights as porno stud, proposes a perverse idea for flaunting his masculinity...
...ethic. The story, in which a family called the Wakatsukis endures in a short span most of life's large experiences (birth, death, new love, even madness), never seems forced or schematic. The result is a work that is modest and touching and refreshingly free of melodrama. It is not at all the sort of thing you expect to find on Thursday Night at the Movies, but which you could hope for more of. Richard Schickel