Word: melodrama
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...FALL, by I. Compton-Burnett (254 pp.; Simon & Schusfer; $4.50). With a country house and all its butlered, bachelored, dowagered, nurseried inhabitants, 70-year-old Ivy Compton-Burnett creates her own cosmos. Her scene is, like the Greek stage, mercilessly compact and periodically given to disquieting revelations and messengered melodrama. The Mighty and Their Fall concerns an enslaving, egocentric widower, Ninian, and his devoted daughter, Lavinia. Ninian decides to remarry. Lavinia becomes emotionally unhinged, a letter is mysteriously withheld, and a family will turns up with a deathbed injunction scrawled on it. By such classic Compton-Burnett devices, not only...
Beyond the melodrama in this and similar passages lies a serious, or at least an earnest argument. "Out there the officers and men discovered that military effectiveness requires adopting the techniques used by the Communists: guerilla warfare, total mobilization of the population, and an unflinching dedication to the achievement of the political goal, without military unnecessaries like pomp and show, or indulgence in intellectual subtleties like defining and refining the goal...
...uncoordinated, rarely clear, and never balanced. Haydn, as Temianka remarked, wrote for the diletanti of the local aristocracy, and in fact, the performance sounded quite dilettantish: the meters of the first and third movements were ambiguous and the 'cello muddy. But in the slow movement, Haydn dispensed with any melodrama or surprises. While the movement's great serene flow, like the cadence of a sonnet, revealed no secrets, it was delicious...
...Children's Hour (Mirisch; United Artists) is Director William Wyler's second try at doing right by Lillian Hellman's 1934 stage melodrama, whose burden was that lesbianism may be regrettable, but a nasty, spying child is simply intolerable. In 1936, when the first screenplay was made, Hollywood shied away from abnormal psychology. Wyler dropped the tainted Hellman title (the picture was renamed These Three) and changed an irregular triangle (young doctor loves girl teacher, and so does another girl teacher) into a right triangle (the two girl teachers love the young doctor...
Nonetheless, the melodrama is great. In rapid succession come plotting, secret messages, angry confrontations, unruly mobs, public confessions, and sledge rides through the Petersburg snow. Through all this, Prince Myshkin appears as a bewildered innocent whose honesty creates more difficulties than it resolves. With the balance tipped so heavily in favor of overdone lavishness the potentially moving utterances of Dostoevsky's Christ sound bizarre and ungenuine...