Word: melodrama
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
That popular Eastern melodrama. Here Come the Generals, which has played so successfully during recent weeks in Pakistan, Burma, Thailand and Iraq, opened to thunderous applause last week in Khartoum, capital of the Sudan...
...dialogue, in which peasant women tend to talk in profound concepts of duty, etc., when isolated seem corny. But the situation can hold the actors in such a tension of dramatic excellence, and the film as a visual whole exerts such a physical impact, that the inherent melodrama and sentimentality blur into unimportance...
...Little Women was a dreary mistake; the miracle of Bernadette was a sugar-coated bomb. Even with French Clown Fernandel to help him, NBC's Bob Hope was merely routine; the mute, moving eloquence of Julie Harris in Johnny Belinda was all that was meaningful in a moldy melodrama. Ginger Rogers in her own special was fine when she danced, but she did not dance enough, giving way too often to bad comedy. It took the old newcomer Fred Astaire to remind the TV audience that-all too rarely-TV entertainment can be great...
...Paycock lies sodden among a ruined family, Con, among a rising one, is both broken and reborn-enough Americanized to raise a glass to the plebeian Andrew Jackson. In both plays the character is superior to the action: where in Juno and the Paycock there is too much contrived melodrama for inevitable tragedy, in Poet there is too much lurking farce for great drama. In its half-dozen best scenes, A Touch of the Poet has a tense, grandly flaring quality of theater. But there are not only letdowns of both flatness and verbosity; there is never the squared, cubed...
...Poignant" has been a bad word ever since Walter Winchell found theatrical producers would quote him in their advertisements if he used it. Yet it's hard to describe this drama, which treads the edge of melodrama with such sure steps, in any other way. People have come to expect from O'Neill the thundering savagery of fallen men in conflict with themselves. But A Touch of the Poet belongs to two women and their story is a fragile...