Word: melodrama
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Richard Burton, once an actor, now performs mainly as a buffoon. In his latest exercise in melodrama, he even permits himself to be outfitted in a sort of jester's motley: outrageous mustard-colored blazer and lavender-trimmed evening clothes. His chin whiskers seem to have been dipped in a vat of Lady Clairol, so his blue beard is colored like a pair of muddy policeman's pants. All that is needed to complete the costume is cap and bells...
...help a feckless law partner who is in financial trouble, and because there seems no reason not to, Lowder accepts a bribe from a Mafia-connected moneyman whose activities are under investigation. The novel follows the muscular workings of the hero's conscience, which, after much interior melodrama, sees him through...
...care or craft as the 90-minute features cranked out for television. They portray all black men as diddy-boppers or street-corner hustlers, all white men as drooling, craven criminals, and women of any complexion as whimpering sex machines. They lack the energy and dignity of good action melodrama. Super Fly and movies like it demean the audiences they are made...
Though the film is pure melodrama, obviously an attempt to create a new popular black hero and not to rip apart Harlem or the cocaine trade directly, one scene is so incisively written and acted with such conviction that it almost transcends its context to make a sad and angry statement on the black condition. Priest needs thirty keys of dope, an unprecedented figure for a pusher, in order to enable him to act on his first plan--simply to sell enough and get out. With his more cynical partner Eddie, Priest goes to the old friend...
...Downey's Messiah is a vaudevillian, his devil is a figure of preposterous melodrama-a glowering, gun-toting saloonkeeper named Greaser (Albert Henderson) who keeps his mother behind bars ("You'll always be my favorite," she reassures him) and who suffers from chronic constipation. His trips to the privy are state occasions, with his retinue of dim-witted subordinates nervously circling outside, awaiting glad tidings of relief that are never forthcoming...