Word: melodrama
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FACING the question of what Huston was trying to do, rejecting melodrama, The African Queen can be seen as a weird-sort-of-pastoral. Allnut and Rose fall in love early in the film and spend most of it being sentimental and affectionate. Allnut shaves, his coarseness quite obliterated by romance, and Rose's up-tightness vanishes after the first clinch; the boat becomes a house in suburbia and Allnut views the tropical wilderness as a New England landscape, saying, "I'd like to come back 'ere some day." Increasingly, they address each other in blissful euphemisms: 'Dear, what...
...odyssey of cockney mechanic Allnut (Humphrey Bogart) and missionary Rose (Katharine Hepburn) down uncharted African waters suggests tense comedy-melodrama: they must, after all, evade rifle fire, skirt rapids, fix boilers, swat flies, brave swamps, remove leeches, blow up German cruisers, and fall in love. Regardless, Huston injects the action with mechanical uncaring: Allnut and Rose talk genially in medium close shot, one of them looks off-screen, says "Look!", and Huston cuts to what they see; he resorts to this lethargic montage in introducing enemy troops, the fort, all rapids, and the boat Louisa. The repetition of dramatic technique...
Claudio Buchwald plays the Author at Quincy House, a self-pitying sort who is trying to piece together a melodrama of murder, poverty, and lust from a collection of uncooperative protagonists. At the outset Anouilh has the courtesy to apologize, though the Author, to Pirandello. After that, Buchwald is left to intervene periodically as the play drifts out of his control. He does so with reasonable skill, although his expression of unrelieved anguish and his habit of passing off fidgeting as unease begin to wear after a while...
...play, but nothing so purposeful as a concept. Anticipating reactions the like of the Dean's, he might have attempted to illuminate the play's historical pageantry, or to point up its underlying political bias. Instead he has opted for a kind of Hallmark Hall of Fame melodrama stirred into the hark-back sentimentality of I Remember Mama...
...story, it is nothing much. Growing up, Kerouac accepts his household gods (Breton ancestry and Roman Catholic religion), goes to school, plays football, goes to sea, and comes home shorn of vanity and, one is given to hope, restored to sanity and innocence. The one touch of melodrama is provided by Kerouac's pal Claude who murders an obstreperous pansy...