Word: melodrama
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Contrived Melodrama. Some echoes of the earlier books are intentional, but Clea has about it a curious air of repeated conversations, slapdash structure, and contrived melodrama. The cruel Memlik Pasha, who in Mountolive "never smiled," is brought onstage in Clea "smiling gently." A girl named Fosca is introduced only so that she may be strangely murdered, ,. and Clea herself is horribly and pointlessly maimed by a fishing spear...
Playwright Cross's desperate measures for keeping melodrama afloat at all costs and his not knowing that too many wrinkles spoil the plot sink what starts off as a good realistic thriller and what, as staged by Windsor Lewis and acted by Lloyd Nolan, Alfred Ryder and others, remains a good naturalistic production. Although to scratch any of the play's characters is to find a stereotype of stage and sea, their talk is effectively racy and their mutineering instincts show promise. The trouble, in the end, is that they mutiny on the author. The play closed...
...socially handicapped by a hint of Arab ancestry and an arty kid brother. The plot turns on Cecil's attempts to introduce his bride into the pukka colony (her first appearance on the tennis courts is a satiric fiasco) and his maneuvering for a promotion. There is taut melodrama involving the escape of a couple of interned Palestinian terrorists, who call Cecil "Spurgeon the Virgin" (possibly the reason why Author Griffin gave him this family name). At novel's end-complacently unaware of the tragic mess he caused, including the inadvertent killing of his wife-Cecil is scrawling...
...alternates appalling melodrama with grisly farce, is now a kind of rancidly self-communing Hamlet, now Venus in a gold wig. The more inhumanly homicidal his acts become, the more inherently suicidal is his mood. Boundless egotism shatters into nihilism, limitless freedom festers into self-imprisonment, until Caligula's assassination at the hands of conspirators is really a welcomed assignation with death...
Ford Startime (NBC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). Producer Hubbel Robinson's wide-ranging crew takes a crack at psychological melodrama. The Man is Audie Murphy, a demented killer at large in the home of a lonely woman (Thelma Ritter). Color...