Word: melodrama
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...Best Man is Gore Vidal's behind-the-scenes melodrama about the in-fighting at a national political convention. A tantalizing game of who's who, peopled with characters who were composites of men in public life, the play bounced onto Broadway four years ago, timed for the 1960 elections. The 1964 movie version tries to be similarly topical, but the prototypes don't match any now around. Some of the dialogue still sizzles, but the effort to freshen it with references to integration only points up how out of date the Eisenhower-Nixon-Stevenson jokes...
STRAY DOG. A rookie detective (Toshiro Mifune) tracks a killer through the Tokyo underworld in a newly imported 1949 melodrama by Director Akira Kurosawa, which stirs up the rubble of postwar Japan...
Finney's performance as a charming, arrogant, boyish, vain and remorseless killer almost justifies redoing the film. But Producer-Director Karel Reisz errs in trying to update the melodrama with an overdose of back-to-the-womb psychology. The motherless Finney washes away dark deeds by splashing in a pond or immersing himself right up to the nostrils in a nice warm tub. In one embarrassingly childish sequence, he regresses almost to the toddler stage. The camera pays more attention to Finney's tortured mental processes than to the all-important hatbox. The new Night trades a real...
...Guilty affects to study the elusive nature of truth and justice, but it is really just a peep show with pretensions. Tony Perkins, cast as an artist-composer-jailbird, speaks French in this melodrama directed by Andre Cayatte (Tomorrow Is My Turn). He does little else to embellish this unsavory little film...
Worse, his metaphysics overwhelms his music-the orchestra does little more than italicize the words of the speaker, and the emotional flow of the music follows the text almost sheepishly. The despair he portrays is only the despair of the prideful; drama is merely melodrama. Bernstein is a man of both cheek and genius; and in this case, the composer in him has been no more than the advocate of the showman, the charmer, the chap in the chukka boots shouting down from the balcony...