Word: melodrama
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...such questions were answered satisfyingly in William Mulvihill's novel. Here they are spelled out according to the conventions of steam-heated movie melodrama, but the film still turns the guesswork into good grim fun. Competition within the group begins in earnest after they find refuge in a hillside cave. While a herd of baboons observes the vagaries of humankind, the six rapidly dwindle. The hardy pilot (Nigel Davenport) sets off to seek help. An old German (Harry Andrews) and a professorial type (Theodore Bikel) are eliminated one way or another by the fittest male, Stuart Whitman...
...late 19th century childhood weren't very good. They took an essentially dramatic situation and did nothing with it. They fitted on a few melodramatic devices and let the emotional associations of the audience create their own effect. Gertrude Stein had too much taste, or timidity, to include the melodrama, so Yes is for A Very Young Man has nothing but a situation: a family of divided loyalties in Occupied France and their American friend live through a tense war and manage to more or less stick together. Change the setting to Baltimore or Algeria, it would probably...
Biographer FitzGibbon tactfully underplays the vulgar melodrama that embarrasses the last act in the tragedy of Dylan Thomas: the sniggery arrival in the U.S. ("I am here in pursuit of my lifelong quest for naked women in wet mackintoshes") and the staggery progress from bottle to bottle, bed to bed, that exhausted his forces and the funds his family so desperately needed. FitzGibbon suggests instead what most clucking literati have chosen to ignore: that in the last years of his life this pintpot Pan with the archangelic voice may have done as much for poetry by reciting...
...powerful iron-mining corporation. An idealistic, inexperienced young lawyer undertakes to sue for her inheritance and, incidentally, to establish her legitimacy. At the end squaw gets fortune and lawyer gets squaw. As a regional novel, Whitefish lacks flavor. As a character study it is inept. But as courtroom melodrama it makes intriguing legal legerdemain...
SHIP OF FOOLS. This flashy melodrama is by Producer-Director Stanley Kramer out of Novelist Katherine Anne Porter's mordant allegory. Despite the Meaningful Dialogue they spout, Vivien Leigh, Lee Marvin, Simone Signoret and Oskar Werner make fast company for the long haul...