Word: melodrama
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Willing Writer. Allen's spoken words often have a slapdash, off-the-cuff quality-most outrageously displayed in his film What's Up, Tiger Lily, a Japanese melodrama bearing Woody's hilarious non-sequitur dubbing. Yet his written prose displays the tongue-and-groove perfectionism of a genuine craftsman. "Allen is a marvel of a willing and hard-working writer," says Roger Angell, fiction editor of The New Yorker. "The first things he submitted to us were funny, but not really written; one heard a stand-up comic -good jokes, but just jokes. Allen has made himself...
STRATFORD, Conn.--Bernard Shaw often took a condescending attitude to Shakespeare. But even when taking potshots at Julius Caesar, Shaw conceded that it is "the most splendidly written political melodrama we possess." Since we cannot escape politics, the play is always timely. It is particularly so in a national election year like this one; and again so at the end of a decade of violence wreaked upon major public figures from President Kennedy to Governor Wallace. With Caesar cut down not by a loner but by a handful within his own group, there is a striking recent parallel...
Skyjacked is the sort of proudly stupid melodrama that flaunts its absurdities...
...Dickinson similarly examines how the poet learned "the Transport by the Pain--As Blind Men learn the Sun!" and reminds us that despite her astonishing outpouring of poems (366 in 1862, 174 in 1864) only seven were published in her lifetime. Annette Baxter has little trouble recreating the disturbed melodrama of Isadora Duncan's career, recently popularized by Vanessa Redgrave--the erratic public acceptance of her work, the flamboyance of her marriages and the tragedies of her children's deaths and her own. And finally, Douglas Day helps to debunk the image of Gertrude Stein as blue-stocking and "great...
...distress and finally, a showdown--Japanese style. However, Yojimbo goes beyond all this and so avoids the mediocrity of a morass of cliches. Akira Kurosawa, the director, who focused world attention on Japanese cinema with Rashoman and Seven Samurai, succeeds in Yojimbo without resorting to either didacticism or melodrama. Violence accompanies comedy and through this incongruity. Kurosawa states that even in its evilest moments, the human animal is funny. Perhaps, Kurosawa believes that only then is man funny, for in the film, when the evil is vanquished, so is the humor and nothing remains...