Word: melodrama
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...coincidence worthy of some Kabuki melodrama, Emperor Hirohito's first visit to American soil occurred just a week before the official publication of a startling new book that proclaims him a major war criminal. Japan's Imperial Conspiracy (Morrow; $14.95) charges that Hirohito, far from being a mild and unworldly figurehead, personally supported and even encouraged the attack on Pearl Harbor. The main reason he escaped hanging was that General MacArthur needed his symbolic authority to maintain order during the Allied occupation of Japan...
...persisted in his optimism, though it has been severely tried. Just as he was beginning to establish himself in postwar Hollywood as a young director of substantial gifts, he was offered the script of a shrill melodrama entitled I Married a Communist. He refused to film it. Later he discovered that to his bosses at the old RKO studio, anyone who declined the project was politically suspect. Losey's political history-sponsoring Composer Hanns Eisler, supporting Playwright Bertolt Brecht, signing a friend-of-the-court brief for Producer Adrian Scott, one of the original Hollywood Ten-got him into...
...film strikes a sometimes successful, sometimes tenuous balance between suspenseful diversion and romantic melodrama. Klute's character is never adequately probed, and there is an uncomfortable number of genre cliches, including a hoked-up terror-in-the-last-reel episode that lacks both terror and surprise. Worse, the sentimental fadeout runs completely contrary to the strenuously realistic tone the film has struggled to sustain...
Nominally about the spiritual agonies of a basketball star at a large university, the movie makes several elaborate feints at symbolism, then quickly collapses under the weight of its petrified pretensions. Nicholson seems to be after a kind of existential melodrama: the basketball player frozen by his own spiritual malaise, with his roommate, the campus radical who goes mad in the last reel, representing the inevitable result of purposeful action in an insane world. But the film is too incoherent to sustain such interpretations. The action sways sloppily between the ballplayer and the radical, straddling an unwieldy subplot concerning...
...excised John Jaymes of Young American Enterprises, Sam Cutler, the Dead with their bright ideas, once you've reduced Belli to a harmless comic figure, and the Stones to unwitting spectators of their own spectacle, who's loft but the Angels, and what's left but another melodrama, one in which beefy Alfred Jarrys play the villains, and everyone else the innocents. A self-defined outlaw gag, but not the kind of outlaws that sign million dollar contracts, the Angels are denied appeal. Though Grace Slick says, "People get weird and we need the Angels to keep people in line...