Word: melodrama
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...best. Lamb's temporary political disgrace, for example, had less to do with his wife's indiscretions than with parliamentary machinations, and Lady Caroline had several other heated liaisons subsequent to the one with Byron. In the Bolt version, such niceties must yield to the demands of melodrama...
...drinking. Chaplin wants the drunkenness to be tragic, but he presents it in such a benign manner that it's never even pathetic. Even as a drunk he, like the rest of the cast, speaks in stilted language with a stilted articulation that is too melodramatic even for a melodrama--a far cry from Charlie Chaplin the appealing tramp, whose title frames said things like "I thought you was a chicken." He even tries to make patter jokes in the style of Groucho Marx, but his delivery isn't punchy and the jokes fall flat...
...maybe that is what he meant to do with the Carson impressions. Screenwriter Beckerman lifts at least two scenes from Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep. He may know quality but he cannot duplicate it, and never makes up his mind whether to do straight hard-boiled melodrama or imitation Damon Runyon. No such doubts apparently plagued the director. He establishes a consistent tone of massive mayhem. Kulik attempts to disguise every lapse in logic with a lapse in taste...
...latest crisis was right out of a grade-B melodrama. A bankrupt railroad was being struck by a union that had seen better days over the fate of 5,700 superfluous brakemen. A bankruptcy court ordered a reduction in the work force last December, and management decided to drop the brakemen through attrition. Even though no workers were to be fired, the union's president, Al Chesser, did not care to see his ranks depleted, and he authorized a strike. Before Chesser's men went back to work some 160,000 commuters had to find alternate ways...
...movie is solidly in the tradition of Hollywood barbed-wire melodrama, the kind where Otto Preminger. playing the camp commandant, was always striding about in high black boots, smoking luxuriously and sneering at his desperate charges. Indeed, there is such a character here, a Citizen Major ("I'm not going to fool around with you. If you want to go back to Siberia..."). In the old Hollywood versions, women appeared only in flashbacks. In The First Circle they are present as warders whose proximity causes some inmates to writhe on their bunks of an evening and groan, "Give...