Word: melodrama
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...NIGHT OF THE FOLLOWING DAY. Masquerading as a routine kidnaping melodrama, this is actually an artful thriller directed and co-authored by Hubert Cornfield. Marlon Brando gives his best performance in almost a decade...
...mechanics of melodrama infest the story to its detriment. The tough white whore (Susan G. Pearson) commits suicide offstage out of unrequited love for Johnny, an event that is distinctly implausible. At times the play meanders without a visible sense of direction. Despite such flaws, the drama ticks with menace and, for such an abrasive subject, is unexpectedly and explosively funny. Gordone has expertly oiled the sly and sassy tongues by which black puts down his fellow black, and the cast's phrasing of these expletives is impeccable...
...Niemans were ready. Paul "Papa" Houston it a pop which the CRIMSON dropped. Paul "Pro" Hemphill smacked a zinger to left. That left it up to Jon "Jugs" Yardley, who creamed a sweet pitch deep to Conigliaro country. Conigliaro being absent, the CRIMSON caught the ball after much melodrama, and then from shortstop. There was much argument with plate umpire Adam Yarmolinsky, but the CRIMSON lost...
Henri-Georges Clouzot (The Wages of Fear, Diabolique) is a French film maker whose stock in trade is grafting psychological aberrations onto standard and somewhat sleazy melodrama. In La Prisonnière, his first film in eight years, Clouzot once again mixes an ordinary story with kinky characters, a soupçon of violence, and a touch of Krafft-Ebing just to add some spice. The result is pat, predictable and more than a little distasteful...
...notes for the second play, but never got around to outlining the final drama, so far as is known. Blind Beauty itself was, in fact, believed lost, the only copies having been seized by the secret police. How a copy survived and reached the West is unknown. A sensational melodrama, set in the 1840s, the work bristles with bandits and bursts of gunfire. The heroine is a serf girl, blinded as the result of a violent quarrel between master and slave. She seems to be meant to symbolize Russia, forever the victim of the conflict between barbarism and the simple...