Word: melodrama
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...skillfully, he indulges in painfully obvious satire. (This heavy-handed treatment may, of course, reflect the pressing concern about America which motivated the book.) Similarly, rather than painting the comedy which is mingled with the tragic in human lives, he emphasizes tragedy almost to the point of bad melodrama...
...from being simply a detailed and objective chronicle of the assassination," Epstein writes, Death of Lancer was "a mythopoeic melodrama organized around the theme of the struggle for power between two men, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson . . . [But] the characters bearing these names in Death of Lancer have at best a questionable relation to the real persons themselves and at worst no relation at all outside the heated imagination of the author...
...only to carry off this scene, there must be something in Richard to dominate the play and all its characters. This Alan Bates lacks. Less butcher than ballet master, less Machiavelli than Mack the Knife, Bates prances where Richard pounces, smirks where Richard sneers. While melodrama is often a parody of tragedy, it cannot stand the added parody of kidding itself, which is what Bates does. The kingdom of this play needs a masterful Richard more than Richard needs a horse...
...their sleeve garters in fear and frustration. The black hats are many and merciless, the lawmen feckless and few. The community antes up for its own gunmen, and the action begins. Now, in real life and modern dress, the city of Houston is playing out the old melodrama...
Unfortunately the most interesting angle in Hurry Sundown -- the Caine character and his giant industrial complex, symbolic of the sudden change coming over the South in the wake of the war -- is ultimately lost beneath a rubbish of uninteresting violence and melodrama. A trial scene straight out of Perry Mason (via Horton Foote and To Kill a Mockingbird) works by itself but doesn't jell at all with the rest of the picture. A hopelessly embarrassing songfest, at which the town's entire Negro population is conveniently present, reminds one of similar affairs in Marx Bros. movies...