Word: melodrama
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...that his younger brother has been murdered by a local sheriff (Ned Beatty), who has been getting a substantial skim off the moonshine profits. McKluskey turns state's evidence in order to get himself out of prison and get the goods on the sheriff. There is grim melodrama and folk comedy here, but Screenwriter William Norton sloughs off the more serious themes of an informer working inside a situation for which he has the strongest sympathy and of a whole system of free enterprise that exists outside the law but is still a strong part of it. Reynolds shows...
...with glinting carving knives, rivulets of blood and grinning, pasty ghosts from the past. This is saved, quite properly, for the last. But in order to get hooked by it, and through it to learn the movie's fairly intriguing gimmick, it is necessary to endure all the melodrama that goes before. Everything considered, it is too high a price...
...Call of the Wild. Jack London's junior high school classic of beasts and the beast in us all becomes a stirring melodrama in the hands of the unlikely duo of Clark Gable and Loretta Young. The film version loses the real feel of the hot bolld of the novel, but it has an appeal of its own, as it makes little pretense of following the drift of the book. The magnificent Jack Oakie is alone worth the price of admission which, of course, is free. Channel...
...Hireling. British class war in a limousine. Robert Shaw is the chauffeur, and Sarah Miles is Lady Franklin, the cultured English lady who is the object of his desires. Shared the Cannes 1973 Best Film Award, but it is often dull stuff, with overplayed melodrama. Abbey...
...fashioned in his rhetoric, old-fashioned in his melodrama, Cohen is old-fashioned in his ethical authority as well. He reasserts here the right of a contemporary novelist to define problems spiritually as well as psychologically, to explore the mystery of the community as well...