Word: melodrama
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...French switch on this, as refined in Rififi (1956), things are the other way round: attractive criminals get girls, gats and a clockwork plan for a caper, and the audience roots for them to The End. French clockwork, however, is not always reliable, and this amoral little melodrama starring Jean Gabin and Alain Delon ticks only intermittently...
...Life to Live. Jean-Luc Godard is the wild man of the new French cinema. After Breathless, the volcanic melodrama that inaugurated his career way back in 1960, he made two movies that even his friends admit are terrible. Then last year he suddenly settled down and made this brilliant film. My Life is a tour de style almost as startling as Breathless but more subtly accomplished, more purely felt. It is also a lyric poem in which the camera assiduously adores a beautiful woman. It is finally the tragic allegory of a soul whose pilgrimage to grace goes spiraling...
Tuesday, August 20 The Dick Powell Show (NBC, 9:30-10-30 p.m.). Anthony Franciosa, Julie London, Jim Backus, Jules Munshin, Cesar Romero and Zsa Zsa Gabor are featured in a melodrama of staggering complexity revolving around a beleaguered nightclub owner...
...mind like well-aimed darts. Her scenes stack like well-designed dishes. Unhappily, there is seldom much nourishment in them. Hellman speaks her mind brilliantly but opens her heart rarely. When the moment requires feeling, she too often offers irony; when the theme invites tragedy, she resorts to melodrama; when the problem demands experiment, she is careful to be commercial. She is exciting but not moving. She writes superbly about sex but badly about love. She creates grand characters but not real people. She has words, sometimes wonderful words. They always say something intensely intelligent; they seldom say anything that...
...anti-heroic. As he said in a Note, "Caesar is greater off the battlefield than on it... I have been careful to attribute nothing but originality to him." Caesar is, as Eric Bentley astutely observed, utterly devoid of the two types of action traditionally associated with the heroes of melodrama: revenge, and erotic passion. Instead, Shaw transfers the skill in both to Cleopatra. Thus he is already playing around with his thesis that it is woman who pursues man, not the other way around--a theme he would later treat in full, notably in Man and Superman...