Word: melodrama
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...There is the drawn-out moment when a seemingly defused bomb reveals a second fuse and blows a man to bits. And through it all, Director Aldrich deploys his camera like a melancholy tourist over the desolate Berlin ruins. As drama, Ten Seconds is something of a dud; as melodrama, it ticks like an activated blockbuster...
...villainy: the hero, crippled emotionally when his second wife dies in childbirth, raises his infant daughter in her mother's cold image, and thwarts all the child's efforts to break free of his oppressive love. But swathed about this core is an unbelievable amount of mustachioed melodrama. The novel's major fault is that, for the greater part of its length, the major actors glide about like decapitated ghosts searching for their heads, scaring the daylights out of onlookers but affecting each other...
Coming after 29-year-old Author Feibleman's exceptional first novel, A Place Without Twilight (TIME, March 3, 1958), the new book is a disappointment. But for all its melodrama and its occasional flavor of Charles Addams under the magnolias, it is still well worth reading. Feibleman is a fine stylist who almost never gets his hands sticky. He sees people shrewdly, and can set down small scenes with great poignancy. The episode that ends the book is a masterpiece-even though it parodies the whole novel and the entire Southern school of literary fungus munchers. After the hero...
Anatomy of a Murder (Carlyle Productions; Columbia), based on the 1958 bestseller by Robert T raver (pen name of Justice John D. Voelker of the Michigan Supreme Court), is a courtroom melodrama that seems less concerned with murder than with anatomy. In scene after scene, the customers are bombarded with such no-nonsense words as "intercourse . . . contraceptive . . . spermatogenesis . . . sexual climax." And even the least barkbound of spectators may find himself startled to see and hear, in his neighborhood movie house, extended discussion of what constitutes rape ("Violation is sufficient; there need not be a completion ... on the part...
Compulsion. The Leopold-Loeb case recreated in a taut, adult melodrama...