Word: melodrama
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...seriousness, he cannot escape communicating the sense of farce-deadly comedy-which must have pervaded the court rooms in which these 28 men were heard and sentenced. For the Army is so blatant in its injustices, and so primitive in its thinking that the procedings quickly become drippy with melodrama. This isn't Sherill's fault. It is a function of the startling incompetence of so many lower level army officers, and the Armed Forces' supreme sense of self-confidence...
...conflict between words and poetry in which moral dignity and reason itself are consumed by degraded language. The nobility of man and woman must resist the corruption of mad discourse. The argument of values in Troilus and Cressida, a singularly distasteful but revelatory play, becomes a murderous melodrama of confused abstraction and disfigured moral orthodoxy. Men have lost the traditional meaning of reason, action, pride, and honor, yet oppose these, in bitter debates between corrosive delusions. This is the historic worry of heroic song, Platonic dramatic dialogue-poems, Shakespeare, the Romantics, modern poets such as Pound and Eliot, and even...
...surely have been heightened had I been able to muster more respect for the play itself. The Winter's Tale. despite its current vogue in literary circles, is in my opinion a seriously limited play. The princely bickering and love-feuds etched out in the first scenes invite superficial melodrama. The switch to a pastoral nexus in the middle third is abrupt enough, even without the equation between a Golden Age and the Age of Aquarius...
...Sicilian Clan is a tidy, entertaining Mafia melodrama about the biggest don in Paris; it is also a glossy, suspenseful heist film, dealing with what sounds, on paper, like the world's most impossible robbery. Directed with taut professionalism by France's Henri Verneuil, the movie is just absurd enough to amuse those who like their capers with a grain of salt...
...problem in the material-how to put egomania on the stage. Rolfe obviously could emphathize only with his own person or with projections of his personality (the young alter ego George Arthur Rose and the Bishop of Caerleon). The other characters in his fantasy pageant fit into stereotypes of melodrama. Tocqueville was not the last egotist to structure a world view on the assumption that all other human beings are coarse and mediocre. A dramatic rendering of Tocqueville's Recollections would have just as many pitfalls as Rolfe's Hadrian the Seventh. Rolfe the "religious fanatic" leaves everyone else...