Word: melodrama
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Stewart plays the heavy convincingly, but Director Ford is not satisfied with the melodrama that falls out of the over turned cliché, and he switches tracks again. For those still willing to string along, there is a fist fight somewhat less solemn than a Laurel and Hardy pie throwing, then a lynching in which no last-minute rescuer shows up. Director Ford's effort might be compared to the pastime of a successful gunfighter who, between important assassinations, lies on his back in a hotel room, drinks dark ale, and obliterates with his six-gun all the flies...
...nearly forgotten documents that he retrieved from his wife's nephew, who had stored them inside an unused dumb-waiter shaft. But even then, Chambers did not produce the microfilm-later he explained that he was afraid it might contain material that would damage other people. With characteristic melodrama, Chambers hid the film roll in a hollowed-out pumpkin in a field on his Maryland farm, surrendered it only when he became convinced that a committee counsel suspected him of withholding evidence. Discouraged by the "indifference" of the world, Chambers later said he had tried to kill himself during...
Rocco and His Brothers (Titanus-Films Marceau; Astor) is an interminable, sprawling, jerkily cut and overpraised melodrama (winner of 22 awards including the Venice Film Festival top prize for 1960) about the troubles of a peasant mother and her five sons who migrate to Milan from a farming village in southern Italy. Its director is Luchino Visconti, a film-struck Roman aristocrat currently revered as one of the triumvirate-along with Federico Fellini (La Strada, La Dolce Vita) and Michelangelo Antonioni (L'Avventura)-which has brought Italian film making out of its mid-fifties doldrums...
This much is a story of indifference; the court trial that frames it is a drama-and occasionally a melodrama-of incomprehension. The judges who try Dominique refuse to believe that she shot her man in blind despair growing out of her love for him, not premeditated spite. They listen stolidly when her defense attorney tells them that she had been treated heartlessly, hide flickering lust with censoriousness when the prosecution relentlessly details her love affairs. Hopelessly, she lashes at the judges: they are old men in silly robes, they cannot understand, they are dead. That night she commits suicide...
Frantic is a slow-moving melodrama directed by Louis Malle, who filmed The Lovers. Blonde Jeanne Moreau, who charged The Lovers with her intense, weathered sensuality, is the.star, and the plot at first seems to be that of a satisfactory thriller: Jeanne and her lover plot the killing of her husband, a rich industrialist, but during the getaway the lover gets trapped overnight in an automatic elevator (an authentic French touch). Perhaps things went wrong when Trumpeter Miles Davis was hired to do the sound track; trumpeters are doubtful assets, and should never require feature billing. Director Malle has confined...