Word: melodrama
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...melodrama-subtitle it The Snob's Revenge-Read's romance twirls its waxed mustaches too wickedly. (In training for his major villainies, the parson's son also steals, pimps, and drowns a newborn baby.) Read's true gothic gift is for translating melodrama into a morality play: plotting on tabloid pulp paper while commenting on the finest India leaf. It is as a study of repentance that Read's story demands to be taken seriously...
WEDNESDAY: The Enforcer. (1951) Whatever else this Humphrey Bogart crime melodrama may be, it is more violent than the Battle of Culloden and rivals nuclear war. At least ten people die on-screen in bloody detail and another 20 or 30 are implicated in the general mayhem. Bogie comes through clean of course as the upstanding D.A. fighting organized crime. Where are the Special Prosecutors of yesteryear" CH.38...
...chateau itself, looming against the skies of Languedoc, looks like the scene of a Gothic melodrama. Turkeys roost on the veranda, and assorted dogs and cats prowl the courtyard where lilacs bloom. In an unburied coffin lies the late Baron Léonce de Portal, whose family title dates back seven centuries. The new baron, Jean-Louis de Portal, has been holding off the police at rifle point for more than six weeks...
...constantly craning his neck and turning his Roman profile to the light, Kennedy seems a little too arrogant: his sneers make the Titan's earlier compassion for man incomprehensible. With the exception of Liz Tyler, the chorus leader, and Louise Claps, the supporting cast too often tends toward melodrama or sing-song declamation. Tyler is adequate in a role comparable to the straight man in a comedy team; like a kindly next-door neighbor, she foils the cries and anguish of Prometheus and Io. The madness of Claps's Io just touches the edge of hysteria...
...attraction was a real-life melodrama not unlike the scripts that have been shot on location in the desert around Gila Bend. An inquest was being held into the death of the young business manager of English Actress Sarah Miles. The manager, David Whiting, was found dead in Miles' motel room a month ago during the shooting of MGM's western, The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing. Pills and bottles were scattered around his body, and bruises and a bloody cut were found on his head. Miles and her co-star Burt Reynolds had originally declined to testify...