Word: melodrama
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...nude wave is almost unbelievably shabby- abominable acting, inane dialogue, scratchy sound tracks, color that looks as if it were developed in peroxide. Plot is so incidental that old seduction scenes are freely spliced into new films. In many instances, the footage is a third-rate melodrama bought cheaply in Europe and then fleshed out with a few shots of naked girls romping in the grass...
...bucolic little acre of Greenfield Center, Vt., weeded by systematically poisoning mentally retarded children and town skinflints who fight bills for new schools. Burl Ives as the doctor made a sly sweet monster, but he wasn't really scary. What was really scary about the Ira Levin melodrama was that someone produced...
...mystery, Heat of the Night won't stand up Detective Poi tier does most of his investigating off screen, and several critical links to the murder's solution are left unexplained. Apparently realizing this, Jewison has defended the picture's weakness as a melodrama by saying, in effect, that it isn't one. He suggests that the real subject matter is the relationship between Poi tier and Stinger, and that the loose construction of the mystery throws proper emphasis onto that relationship. As long as this argument wasn't devised after the picture's completion, one can assume that Jewison...
...spiels and deals like a 19th century bunco artist out of Texas Guinan by W. C. Fields, yet incongruously wheels a shiny red convertible around like a hell driver. His partner, mooning around Sue Lyon's earthy smile, is a love-struck leftover from turn-of-the-century melodrama, yet speaks the language of the contemporary soldier. Like the cars its heroes steal and riotously wreck, the script starts strong but plots its own collision course, and eventually piles up in a harmless heap of miscellaneous parts that no longer mesh. The viewer, who begins by sympathizing with...
...weeks after the O'Neill premiere in California, the first Broadway curtain will rise on Dr. Cook's Garden, an Ira Levin melodrama about medical ethics, with Burl Ives, Screen Actor Keir Dullea (David and Lisa) and George C. Scott as director. From Britain, David Merrick is bringing a sure conversation piece: Playwright Tom Stoppard's existentialist upending of Hamlet, titled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Another West End import is the adaptation of Muriel Spark's novel about a slightly bonkers Edinburgh schoolmarm, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The title role, perfected by Vanessa...