Word: melodrama
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Unwilling to grind out a routine crime melodrama, but unable to turn it into the cynical satire he seems to have hoped he was making, he simply botched his assignment. Frankenheimer's flair for action sequences-a chase involving a school bus, a shootout in a giant, steaming laundry-can still be summoned up. But the rest of the film is heartless, tasteless and noisily desperate. It is always sad to see an overreacher turn into an underachiever, but to find the tense talent capable of The Manchurian Candidate busying himself with feckless projects like this is infuriating. When...
...distance Bromell creates between his characters, and between them and their lives, makes for an easy, casual calm. This calm assurance, in turn, is what makes his affirmations seem reasonable, even convincing. The Slightest Distance contains no melodrama, no startling events, no catastrophes. Our real life, it assumes, takes place in our minds, where the important things happen quietly, while on the outside it looks like nothing is changing...
Smith, 38, is an associate professor of English at the University of New Hampshire and the father of four daughters. His large and eccentric melodrama is marked by lavish skill at doing what novelists always need to do-write scenes, weave narrative threads, hatch and construct characters, see and smell and feel and describe. Good sentence piles upon good sentence until the novel sags and cracks. What it sorely needs is a blue pencil and an artistic point of view...
Thus wrote Thomas Burke, describing the place where he was born and grew up: the brawling, sinister area that was London's Limehouse district before World War I. Out of his memories and a highly developed sense of melodrama, he produced a series of short stories called Limehouse Nights. The book was published in 1916, an era whose image of itself was still that of Galsworthy's Forsytes and the Bellamys of TV's Upstairs, Downstairs. Burke was hailed then as savagely realistic. His book has lived on ever since as a kind of eccentric minor classic...
Alfred the Great, the first part of Israel Horovitz's "Wakefield Trilogy," has nothing to do with kings or Yorkshire. It's a seriocomic Pinteresque melodrama involving two spouse-swapping couples in our own Wakefield just north of Boston, where the playwright was born. It's a handsomely acted and fascinating fable of four frustrated and funny freaks. You may believe that murder, adultery, impotence and sadism can't be amusing, but you're wrong; and you'll also have something to mull over for days afterward. But you've got only until Aug. 17, when the troupe follows...