Word: melodrama
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Bowie Kuhn, the Commissioner of Baseball, must have been a happy man last week. For the first time in four years, the World Series was not a stage for Kuhn's No. 1 nemesis, A's Owner Charlie Finley, and Oakland's annual post-season melodrama of clubhouse brawls and management-player disputes. Instead, baseball's show of shows was a tight, tense struggle between the Boston Red Sox and Cincinnati Reds. It even featured an old-fashioned flap over an umpire's call and an indeterminably aged Cuban pitcher with a penchant for cigars...
This is the sort of private-eye period piece that means to do honor to the traditions of Raymond Chandler and the hard-boiled melodrama. But through its own dim eagerness it ends up making a mockery of them. How can anyone take such an enterprise seriously, after all, when the detective runs around in a trench coat six inches too short and 25 years...
Brave Struggle. All the familiar material of rehabilitation melodrama is here: doubtful doctors and blind determination; parents trying to be brave, a fiancé who has pledged true love wilting away from the full force of the tragedy, other patients being both cynical and supportive as Jill masters her wheelchair. Her struggle is abetted by another skier, a cordial eccentric called "Mad Dog" Dick Buek (Beau Bridges) who wants to marry her. She greets his initial proposal with one of those speeches about pity that seem to be required by films like this the way a western needs a Shootout...
...Such melodrama tics, Minuchin believes, bring about a temporary exorcism of the anoretic's fear of open disagreement with her parents and become a rite of passage. The girl will eventually begin to eat, but the next problem is to keep her from slipping back to her old ways. Family therapy is then begun; parents and child get together with Minuchin for sessions in which they discuss their underlying pressures and conflicts...
...when she inherits the fortune of her great-uncle Douglas, the fifth Baron Rhodes. In short order she marries her titled cousin Niles and thus becomes a countess. Whether the marriage is an improvement-whether, in fact, it is a marriage -is a question that remains open till the melodrama's final scenes. Niles is charming and affectionate but in an oddly distant mode. Months after the wedding, Clara remains utterly ignorant of the process by which her species reproduces itself. It is clear that Niles is unduly influenced by his improbable mother and by a coarse, swaggering manservant...