Word: melodrama
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Choosing to subtitle the play "a melodrama," Shaw appropriated and satirized all the traditional features of this genre. Like other melodramas, it pretty much plays itself, it lacks plausibility and subtlety, and it makes no demands whatever on its onlookers. But under Cyril Ritchard's direction, the present production has emerged bright and brassy...
...Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities, where Sidney Carton goes to the guillotine in the stead of his friend Charles Marnay. Ironically, death did not, however, remain a matter of stage make-believe. Shaw wrote the play in 1896-97 at the request of the famous actor of melodrama Wiliam ("Breezy Bill") Terriss; but, before Terriss ever essaved the title role, he was murdered by a madman outside London's Adelphi Theatre...
Youth constitutes 56% of the movie audiences. But what about the other 44%? Isn't their money just as good as the kids'? Better, declare the makers of A Walk in the Spring Rain. And so they have produced a menopausal melodrama reminiscent of an old Ladies' Home Journal serial. All that is missing are three staples and a recipe for lemon chiffon...
...members of Elgar's family, act with closely calculated wit and an eye for the tellingly ludicrous gesture. Diana Sands is lithe and musky as the former Miss Sepia. Best of all, though, is Beau Bridges. His peppy performance ranges widely between antic comedy and tough melodrama. He handles both with equal facility, as well as the subtler shadings in between. He is surely one of the very best young actors in films today, good enough to make The Landlord worth seeing. That in itself is quite an accomplishment...
...With her warm nylon skin and electronic memory-bank brain, she behaves more humanly than he does, thinks more briskly than he can. In the end, eunuch and robot, in mutual exasperation, fall to their death in each other's embrace, like lovers in an old-fashioned melodrama...