Word: melodrama
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...their hopes up unduly, his recent Killing of Sister George turned out truly mediocre, the same restless cutting that compels in Lylah Clare working against him in Sister George. Aldrich is a heavy-handed man, and Lylah Clare deals in heavy-handed mysticism, heavy-handed acting stylization, heavy-handed melodrama, heavy-handed tragedy, and heavy-handed meaning. This ideal blend, strange-but-true, results in something less than heavy-handed, perhaps because Aldrich has been able to adapt his style to fit the many different eras of movie-making the film describes. His black-and-white-and-red-all-over...
Madigan. Donald Siegel's elegant classicism imparts thoughtful ambiguity to this excellent police melodrama. The honesty of the filming (and of Siegel's fine actors) make the fate of the characters a matter of some importance to the audience. As we become involved, the script's resolutions assume moral force, and the inconclusiveness of real-life relationships is ably conveyed through intelligent use of genre. Siegel makes few personal judgements along the way and we are left to our own instincts in dealing with Madigan, his wife, and the Police Commissioner; consequently, Madigan's death doesn't resolve anything neatly...
...Targets has one hell of a pay-off, and adding it to the film's generally successful calculation, Bogdanovich comes out pretty clean considering this is his first movie. Midway through he begins to set up a contrast between the horror of reality represented by the sniper and the melodrama horror of movie reality represented by Orlock. At the end, Orlock takes Bobby, knocking a gun out of his hand with a cane, asserting a potency he had thought nonexistent. Although ambiguous, the effect is one of total release: we are still in a movie, and in the movies...
...barely adequate cast seems to relish all opportunities for bombast and comic clowning. The chorus resembles the witches from Macbeth multiplied. The murders might as well have been performed by Richard III. Elizabethan Greeks are a novelty all right, but they reduce the play to historical pageantry, horseplay and melodrama when it ought to be blindingly focused on man's ineluctable rendezvous with fate...
...shown rare dignity. She has submerged such feminine solidarity as she may have felt for Effie in a measured view of the manners and morals of both parties and of the age in which they lived. For all its peephole pettiness, the story stirs the mind like a psychological melodrama and flows as smoothly as any contrived 18th century novel of manners. Whoever was right, whatever their pangs and posturings, the Ruskins emerge as vivid and graceful correspondents. If no book like this ever celebrates the famous domestic wrangles of the present day for future readers, part of the blame...