Word: melodrama
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...record of the journey is Glen and Randa, a primitive, desperate odyssey by the last bewildered survivors of an atomic holocaust, stumbling through the wreckage of a vanished civilization. Neither moralizing sci-fi nor melodrama, despite its fanciful premise, the film is rather like a cinéma vérité doomsday documentary-a parable in newsreel form...
...moneyed man's San Francisco, and Hero Worshiper Snell going through the day-today hassles of making a tentative kind of life for himself and his family. Kaylor captures scenes and feelings-fac-tores, roadhouses, dancehalls, motorcycles-that make similar attempts in Joe look like musty melodrama...
...Buttercup Chain is a leaden comedy-melodrama about the intramurals two young couples play as they wander around England, Spain and Sweden. The characters are in their early 20s, but by comparison to the children in the other youth pictures, they seem to be drifting into senility, an impression strongly reinforced by their mummified acting. Jane Asher and Sven-Bertil Taube are attractive and easy enough to take, but Hywel Bennett looks like a cross between Paul McCartney and Elmer Fudd. Then there is doe-eyed Leigh Taylor-Young, an actively bad actress who improves only when she takes...
This is the stuff that makes bad melodrama, and Saura knows it and is indifferent to it- because he cares nothing for his plot. Given the story situation, he could have made the film into a psychological study, a detective story, or a lover's confrontation. But his aim is merely to tease the possibilities of all three, just enough to provide a context for his real interest which is to create a parable of the decay of capitalist consciousness. The hallucinating mind of Antonio comes to represent a political system deprived of coherence, left only to a bombast...
Robert Ludlum is an ex-actor whose first novel, The Scarlatti Inheritance, owes a large debt to histrionic melodrama. Its action encompasses the two World Wars. Its central figure-heir to the immense Scarlatti industrial fortune-is Ulster Scarlatti, a thoroughly bad seed who may be depraved but is certainly not deprived. Active duty as a younger scion in the U.S. Army during World War I infects him with a fondness for fascism. After the war, under the gullible noses of the family's financial advisers, he transfers huge sums of money to Europe. Then, poof! . . . he disappears...