Word: melodrama
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...must be obvious that this is an uneven play. Director David Lelyveld has exploited the excitement of his situation to the utmost but too often he succumbs to touches of purest melodrama. The basic cause of unevenness, though, is Gardner himself, who is by turns eloquent, windy, perceptive, funny, pathetic, cynical, and utopian...
...Kitchen. Too many cooks cannot spoil this spluttering slumgullion of socialism and melodrama, heated to a rolling boil by British Playwright Arnold Wesker...
...good novel with great flaws. Its strengths are in mood, speech and flow of action; its weaknesses are Warren's failure to see the viciousness in Willie Stark, his idealized Huey Long character, and his distrust of his own ability to get through the book without melodrama. The novel's too-obtrusive narrator becomes aware of the unfathomable intertwinings of guilt, for instance, only when he learns that the man he has destroyed at Willie's request is his own father...
This sort of supererogatory melodrama reached a peak of turgidity in Warren's worst novel, Band of Angels (Orville Prescott in the New York Times, 1955: "thoughtful reflections upon moral issues and psychological factors"). Amantha, the beautiful ante-bellum heroine, is setting divinity students aquiver at Oberlin College when she hears that her plantation owner father has died. Back in Kentucky, to her horror and the reader's titillation, she learns not only that she is the daughter of a slave woman, but that the plantation and she herself with it are being sold for taxes. Soon Amantha...
Loss of Innocence. The mood and melodrama of bittersweet 16 are evoked with irony and charm in this British adaptation of Rumer Godden's thriller of sensibility, The Greengage Summer...