Word: melodrama
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Lucia is the second film from revolutionary Cuba to reach Cambridge recently, and that in itself makes it interesting. Pardoning some melodrama, this is a beautiful film about that country's blossoming through the centuries, and the toll taken by history on Cuban women. It will be at the Orson Welles for some time to come...
...last year there have been events that touched us more intensely, events that touched us more intensely, events that live in our memories because of the heroism of their actors or the tragedy in which they ended--heroism and tragedy which the Watergate scandals, for all their absorbing melodrama, have never approached...
...behavior. Donald Pleasence plays another intelligence officer-a compulsive ferret with eyes like stomped marbles-in a true virtuoso turn. Pleasence, however, gets shuffled to the sidelines during the later portion of the film, and the picture itself changes from a briskly elegant exercise into real Mickey Mouse melodrama...
...John Andrews, a public paragon and Chief Justice of Canada's Supreme Court, guilty of manslaughter? Though this deftly constructed Canadian novel has all the familiar elements-suspense, surprise, a fine courtroom scene-it is as far from Perry Mason as classical tragedy is from melodrama. The narrator, who is also Andrews' lawyer, is concerned with the deep roots of culpability or innocence rather than simple detection. He reconstructs the Chief Justice's life, posthumously, through the impressions of people who knew him. The recollections serve as admissible evidence-always selective, always specific. Their purpose...
...appreciate the need for some leading participants in those upheavals to indulge in petty mythmaking. After all, the invention of a few colorful stories about martyrs, villains and dastardly deeds can liven up the historical record. Instead of the drab truth, they present us with history as a melodrama in which good guys line up against bad guys. More than that, myths can serve a useful social purpose. They help us to justify past revolutionary struggles and to raise present radical consciousness...