Word: melodrama
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Under Michael Langham's forceful and fluid direction, the play moves in cinematic takes. But it is the era of the silent movie, compacted of melodrama and soap opera. How can such things have scope and stature? Why do they work and become deeply moving onstage? One possible answer is that at crucial, tense, catastrophic or ecstatic moments in the lives of men and women, they do behave like characters in melodramas or soap operas...
Nothing could have saved Anderson's platitudinous script, but Douglas makes an admirable try. He manages to transform a wholly unsympathetic curmudgeon into an object of reluctant but genuine sympathy. Without his seasoned wizardry, Father would be nothing more than matinee melodrama presented by your favorite bio-nondegradable detergent...
...really isn't fair-almost all of their songs are pretty sentimental. What is remarkable about the Beach Boys is not so much their sentiments as the musical backing they provide for them. "Tears in the Morning," for example, a Bruce Johnston song that certainly has its moments of melodrama, has a very simple melody which is saved by imaginative backing from a French accordion, a xylophone, violins, and multiple-part harmony. All the songs, no matter how trite the melodies, are recorded with a warmth and fullness that is rare in any record production...
...enjoy-or merely endure-Italian opera, especially Verdi, a word-for-word acquaintance with the libretto is not essential. Most listeners will be able to navigate the critical junctures of the average plot by developing a familiarity with a handful of catch phrases. Such verbal adornments keep the melodrama moving and can be used to tell almost any story. As in the following dialogue -drawn entirely from Verdi's Ernani -which took place between an opera-loving wife and a bored husband on opening night at the Met. SCENE...
...words should be said in praise of a tough little movie called Darker Than Amber. It represents a kind of film making that is currently unfashionable: the straightforward, uncluttered private-eye melodrama that was so much a part of the American cinema of the '40s. It is a tradition to which Godard payed homage in Breathless, and out of which came some first-rate film makers like John Huston...