Word: melodrama
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...seven movement work is the sort of piece that helped get under way the esthetic tradition that produced the Albert and Victoria monstrosities. To be played without any break between the section, it has a tremendous capacity for becoming a longwinded, disorganized barrage of pomposity, sentimentality, and self-conscious melodrama. For the first four movements there was a sense of heaviness, as if the music could not build up any motive force of its own and got from one measure to the next only through the brute force of the players...
Still, does lack of suspense matter? Hitchcock is more than a suspense-machine and a technician; his films reflect the work of a mature artist and contain great thematic depth and consistency. Using his familiar hero, the ordinary man plunged unexpectedly into a nightmarish world of melodrama, Hitchcock will allow the nightmare to bring about changes in his heroes: thematically, North by Northwest is about the redemption of a useless individual, The Man Who Knew Too Much about the emergence of a husband's desire to dominate his wife...
...Torn Curtain ultimately fails because the conflicts between Newman and Andrews are neatly resolved at the halfway mark. Once Newman has his formula, Torn Curtain becomes blatant chase melodrama. There is no more characterization and the emphasis switches from Newman and Andrews to the supporting characters involved in the escape from East Berlin: the leader of the Resistance bus, a Polish ex-countess with problems, a villainous ballerina...
...gunman (Karl Maiden) after joining his band of cutthroats. Nevada Smith unreels in refulgent color against a sweep of rocky crags and sagebrush more magnificent than usual, as though Cinematographer Lucien Ballard had tried to fill the back ground with something that might endure longer than the coarse-grained melodrama up front...
...expert airborne excitement, The Blue Max sets out to be a caustic essay on honor, ends up posing questions no more timeless and universal than Who will get Ursula? and Who will be the next ace to fell 20 British planes? The only way to help such synthetic melodrama to a climax is to reveal, once more, the unstartling news that the Kaiser's forces are about to lose World...