Word: melodrama
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...hero (Brando) is the usual good bad guy. the villain (Karl Maiden) is the usual bad bad guy. and the story is pretty much the usual melodrama of revenge...
Unlike in melodrama, the hero in tragedy "is not only an angel, but also a" the critic said in his next to last Charles Eliot Norton lecture. He described melodrama and farce--the "lower" dramatic forms--as "childish," while and comedy are more "grown-up." "The high forms can be distinguished the low by a respect for reality," Bentley maintained...
Pity is the "weaker side" of the appeal of melodrama, Bentley said; the stronger side is fear. Melodrama plays up irrational fear, which includes superstition, religion, and neurosis, more than "common sense fear--the fear of slipping on the ice or falling off a cliff...
Fear aroused by melodrama is "paranoid." It is the feeling that "all things living and dead are combining to persecute us." "Victorian melodramatic novelists made use of bad weather, but to heighten the audience's fear the playwright must substitute outrageous coincidence...
...Melodrama's appeal to fear, however, is essentially "childish," Bentley concluded. "The melodramatic vision is good up to a point," he said, "and that point is childhood." Nor can melodrama be separated entirely from tragedy. "There is melodrama in every tragedy, just as there is a child in every...