Word: melodrama
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...conception of Boys, Crowley said, "I loved Virginia Woolf and it influenced me a lot-but the real inspiration was the Salinger story. 'Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut.' And movies like All About Eve [Mankiewicz's melodrama about Hollywood stardom] and Hitchcock's Rope, which gave me the idea of using confined quarters as a dramatic device...
Segal, whose comic gifts are evident even in melodrama, is allowed a few light moments in the murky pseudo-sensitivity. But whenever the risibility reaches visibility, it is quashed by Director Irvin Kershner's instinct for vulgarity. Most of the time Segal lurches self-sorrowfully around town as if he had just received six bullets in the stomach. The rest of the cast, including such proven caricaturists as Keenan Wynn and Sterling Hayden, similarly behave as if they were dispensing painful truths instead of numbing fictions...
From a director who always built his films about the moral progress of their heroes, this comes as a surprise. So does Hitchcock's indirect use of the script, spreading it to the point of incoherence instead of building its climaxes for all they are worth. Bchind this anti-melodrama lies an anti-hero. Andre Deveraux maintains with almost catatonic consistency his impassivity toward tortures and murders for which he is responsible...
...YORK critic who called La Femme Infidele a "perfect bourgeois drama" had reason to be proud of himself. Claude Chabrol's new film takes for its subject the most hackneyed situation in melodrama, the triangular love relationship. Its subtlely of expression bespeaks the most exquisite taste. The critic's label nevertheless implies that the film's scope is restricted, and while most audiences may find that true. La Femme Infidele is far from the good little movie the label implies. It is perfect not because Chabrol has restricted his aims, but because he has taken his dramatic situations, themes...
...Devil himself. Arriving in London and finding his friends happy is too much for Julius. Playing on vanity, sowing distrust he labors suavely to link Rupert with Hilda's younger sister and Simon with himself. As the plot unravels, the book shifts from comedy to melodrama, to tragedy-a course few writers could control or sustain. Miss Murdoch nearly manages it, because her presence is so forcefully stamped on every event and every line of dialogue. She is moralist, realist and magician, an unsentimental Titania gazing coolly at the "enchanted donkeys"-lovers whom she awakens from Midsummer Night...