Word: melodrama
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...reduction of personality to sex organs is the dynamic of skin flicks and soap op era. Sad to say, Williams wrote this Petit Guignol sideshow in the late '50s, soon after completing his masterpiece, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Today it seems fatally misconceived, a sentimental melodrama instead of a savage, black comedy on southern mores...
...risk, an act of the highest artistic confidence. Reassurance comes in the strong melodrama of the film's second half. From the moment Marisa Berenson, playing Lady Lyndon, appears and Barry's suit for her hand succeeds, the film, without seeming to change its style or gently enfolding pace, gathers tremendous dramatic force of a quite conventional sort. Barry's loveless use of her to further his ambitions has a raw, shocking edge. His conflict with her son by her first marriage, culminating in what is surely the most gripping duel ever filmed, is full of angry...
...based on recent history. The events bear both the sting and the awkward com edy of truth. But unlike Z, a previous Semprun - Costa-Gavras collaboration based on the 1963 assassination of Gregorios Lambrakis, a Greek politician, Special Section lacks the narrative drive that can make a good melodrama with political meaning. Instead, the film is a puppet show of moral indignation...
...fact is that while The Tutor has pretensions to both comedy and tragedy, most of the time it flutters droopily at the level of stale melodrama. If there's little genuine humor here, there's even less heartfelt agony. Even the climactic pre-castration scene, replete with lines like "Is it so reprehensible to be human?" and "I pluck out the eye that offends me" is so overdone it falls completely flat. Ralph Martin, as Hasty, the tutor, doesn't help matters any by giving a generally lackluster performance that makes his sudden access of emotion in this sequence seem...
...celebrated flair for the epic. Religious confrontations, border wars, political sacrifices are illuminated like scenes in a pageant. The very sounds and odors of a vanished world are resurrected-often at the price of subtlety and perspective. For the birth of a nation is not the stuff of mere melodrama; the historical and human scale is too profound...