Word: melodrama
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...girls south of Memphis. Also that the two fully developed female characters are nymphomaniacs allows for frequent relaxations from the business of capturing the statehouse. The only problem with all this is that it imposes the necessity of building up to greater and greater exploits and more improbable melodrama. With the first seduction on the green-felted conference table of the county judge, the difficulty arises of where to go next...
...Hilary's need for affection overcomes even her terror of the "Devil." When she meets him again in a field beyond the Downs, she smiles in welcome and he invites her to his trailer. The last part of Novelist Bawden's melodrama is dominated by the cliffhanging question of what will happen to Hilary in that trailer...
Anna Lucasta (Longridge; United Artists), in the course of its on-again, off-again success story, has suffered more color changes than a traffic light. As first written, back in 1936, Anna was a backstreets melodrama in which Playwright Philip Yordan rummaged among some white trash in a small town. The principal characters were poor Poles, and the heroine was described by one playgoer as "a sort of squarehead Camille." When the play, as written, failed to get a Broadway opening, Playwright Yordan remaindered the rights to the American Negro Theater. The white trash became black trash, and caught fire...
More immediately, it is an excellent and exciting melodrama--melodrama because its kicks stem directly and indirectly from a fast, explosive, and physical series of crises. The plot was taken from a veritable mine of visceral sensation: the case of the body-snatchers Burke and Hare, as told in a story by Donald Taylor. In the last century, it seems, the teachers of anatomy in Edinburgh were forced to deal with "resurrectionists" for the dissection subjects they needed. Two of these "vicious human vermin of the gutters of the city" find it more convenient to murder than...
...words sometimes cast a glow, a light never seen on land or sea, even on the murderers (though never on the murders); but it is Doctor Rock's reaction, in the scene where before a phantom audience he lectures on the dissection of the human conscience, that proves that melodrama can be used for purposes of poetry...