Word: melodrama
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...requires for the blonde mistress of Falconhurst to invite into her bed the handsome black slave (Ken Norton) her husband purchased to improve the breeding stock down in the quarters. Until this moment we cannot be certain that the movie is going to employ every cliche of antebellum melodrama. The possibility that the perfection of its tastelessness will be marred through oversight or the impulse to provide novelty through omission is an irritant. There is great relief when, at last, our heroine (Susan George) succeeds in bending Norton's innocence to her evil will...
...Nights in A Barroom is an old-fashioned Victorian melodrama played for all its worth and given a double edge of irony by its quaint moralism In the temperance spirit, the show offers beer for only a dime a glass. This is a most unusual dramatic production for Harvard, a piece of American social history as well as a piece of popular literature. You may never be able to see a piece of nineteenth century soap opera like this again, at least until it's produced on Masterpiece Theatre. At the Agassiz tonight, tomorrow and Saturday...
...characters avoids two-dimensional typicality. Clara, particularly, as the martyred Working Woman, displays ludicrous malleability in her metamorphosis from Cinderella to Princess at the caprice of the plot. All the romantic music, charming mountain cafes, melting glances and scenic forest idylls De Sica produces cannot lend authenticity to this melodrama, so that the inevitable denouncement is devoid of pathos...
...There seems to be an arbitrary rhetoric of motions with which Ullmann plays the role. When she fears that her husband Torvald (Sam Waterston) will discover her secret dealings with the malignant moneylender Krogstadt (Barton Heyman), she makes the panicky gestures of a heroine in a silent-movie melodrama. When she reads the riot act to Torvald prior to slamming the famous door, she sits as motionless as a pillar of ice. Presumably, this translates as "frozenly adamant...
...fundamental failure of Chris Healey's production of The Pelican lies in its inability to immerse the audience in the mood and theme to the point where plot would become irrelevant and melodrama less of a hazard. Unhappily, the visual and aural effects through which Strindberg intended to achieve this are unsuccessful. Admittedly, conditions in the Ex don't make things any easier. The not-so-mysterious rocking chair rocks frantically and becomes at first funny, then ridiculous; a letter leaps, rather than flutters, off a table; vitally important silences and pauses are mercilessly trampled over. Delicate changes of mood...