Word: melodrama
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...home town of Pekin, Ill., Everett McKinley Dirksen once wrote and directed Chinese Love, a riceball melodrama about the unrequited passion of one Sing Loo for the beauteous Pan Toy. The Washington house of Hugh Doggett Scott Jr., who took over as leader of the Senate Republican minority after Dirksen's death, is chockablock with chinoiserle, mainly from the T'ang Dynasty (A.D. 618-906). That slight Oriental connection is one of the few similarities between the two men. Where Dirksen was a conciliator, expert in sub rosa dealings with Democrats, Scott is an acerbic infighter who means...
HOUSE ON FIRE by Arch Oboler. 249 pages. 8arfholomew. $5.95. A radio and film veteran, the author has produced a nasty little hybrid-part melodrama about two juvenile murderers, part philosophical twaddle about whether God is dead, blind or just out to lunch...
...Shadow of a Doubt brings the best of these themes into a very tightly constructed drama, Returning to the original material of melodrama, it uses a family setting for a complex and subtle interplay of moral perceptions. At the same time the plot is constructed on personal progress; it follows the growth of moral and romantic awareness of an adolescent girl. But though it ends in a clear confrontation between good and evil its use of real locations and realistic performances maintains moral complexity and resonance through the film...
...PLACE TO BE SOMEBODY. Charles Gordone's story of black-white and black-black relations is flawed by melodrama; yet the play ticks with menace and is unexpectedly and explosively funny...
...hard to say where the spoof ends and the soap opera starts. After Butch and Sundance flee to Bolivia, a sterile melodrama sets in. The script now embraces such weighty matters as the alienation of the cowboy from modern society, the alienation of the outlaw from repressive society, and various other alienations. In other words, alienation-a good theme, but a little too ponderously applied to this wisp of a comedy...