Word: melodrama
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...constant in each performance, he is the victim as well as the beneficiary of his material. In his two most recent films, his vast comic abilities tick away in a bomb that never goes off, and his gift for pathos and poignancy soars so far above the surrounding melodrama that the film becomes virtually a one-man show...
Turning to camera styles, those conflicts quickly established in a melodrama, for example, allow a director like Hitchcock to bare to an audience the senses and emotions of a character through cutting, just as romantic abstraction allow a Sternberg to light experimentally with a daring inconceivable in plainer films. Themes and preoccupations as serious as these would be substantially unbearable treated in the context of everyday life--all films would resemble Judgment At Nuremberg. And, just as Poe and Hawthorne made their statements through the heightened reality of romance, the master film-makers are invariably liberated by the specialized contexts...
Hitchcock's films often concern individual therapy and emotional redemption through bizarre and indirect encounters with melodrama. In North by Northwest, Thornhill's adventure with the spies almost kills him, finally leaves him a more complete man than in the beginning of the film; Jeffries in Rear Window is more mature for his journey into depravity, as is Marnie after experiencing for a second time the trauma of her youth. Truffaut is too intelligent to afford dramatic consummation only to Julie's desire for revenge, and some indirect therapy does take place in The Bride Wore Black, Truffaut suggesting that...
Authors Collins and Lapierre, whose first collaboration was the bestselling Is Paris Burning?, make prime melodrama out of El Cordobés' story, and they are frequently informative about the brutal, corrupt realities beneath bullfighting's cloak of romanticism. But the problem with their cinematic technique is that while it requires only a grainy black-and-white script, they give it a glossy, Technicolor treatment. Every irony is underlined, every climax hammered home, every scene overstuffed with authentic touches from their well-stocked notebooks. The result, paradoxically, is that their finished product is rarely as vivid and compelling...
...Shaw was always fascinated by the religious mentality; and, although he often touched on religion elsewhere, he examined it in detail on the stage three times in his career. The first result was The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (1909), a religious tract in the form of a romantic melodrama laid in our own Wild West. The third was Saint Joan (1923), not only Shaw's greatest play but also one of the consummate creative achievements of the twentieth century...