Word: melodrama
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...melodrama sounded like an excerpt from one of Tennessee Wiliams' own plays. "I am in a net of con men," read the hastily scrawled letter the playwright had written to his brother Dakin. "If anything of a violent nature happens to me, it will not be a case of suicide, as it would be made to appear." That sounded ominous, and everybody grew more worried when Williams disappeared from his Manhattan apartment. Reporters finally located him last week at his house in Key West, refusing to talk about anything. "He must have had a bad scare," judged Dakin. Tennessee...
Every time Roman Polanski puts his name on a film, six dozen critics say he's out-Hitchcocked Hitchcock. Rosemary's Baby, a pointless and supremely mediocre melodrama, provoked the same now-customary response: one New York paper assumed confidently that Hitchcock would have been proud to have made it and, on nearer horizons, Boston After Dark's very own Deac Rossell (a nice tall boy who smiles a lot) decided to write a paramount press release calling Rosemary's Baby "worthy of the dean of film thrillers, Hitchcock." I get mad when I read this kind of nonsense...
...beat the trappings of its own genre by being a little better. It is, and its inevitable disappearance on Wednesday should not go entirely unnoticed, nor should we necessarily ignore the Orpheum's next seven-day double-bill. Note that the B picture is not dead, that genre melodrama is still capable of quiet surprise or some intelligence, that small cinematic pleasures often lie where we least suspect them, then that it's good to take chances trying to find them...
ANTHONY MANN, a director commonly associated with several good westerns, turned to modern melodrama in his last films, and made some mistakes. For careful balancing of expansive exterior composition, he substituted that betenoir of camera technique, the zoom lens, with its infinite capacity for making an audience think suspense is present when none actually exists. In The Heroes of Telemark, some corny zoom technique was at least in part redeemed by controlled visual construction and a sensible linear narrative. Perhaps A Dandy In Aspic could have similarly transcended its endless zooms to close-ups of anguished eyeballs and urban details...
After the Whitman baby is born, Foxy gets pregnant by Piet. In panic, they turn to Freddy Thorne for help in finding an abortionist. There follows a rather absurd turn of plot that seems straight out of 19th century melodrama. All but twirling his mustachios, Freddy agrees-in return for a night alone with Piet's wife Angela, the one woman in the tribe who has never entered the communal bed. Implausibly, Angela consents. One night in a ski lodge, after the Thornes and the Hanemas have had too much to drink, Angela suddenly says, "Well, is this...