Word: melodrama
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Concerning your blow-by-blow-by-blow coverage of the launching of the satellite Explorer: less melodrama, more news...
...bathtub tumble at her Hollywood home, grand old (78) Actress Ethel Barrymore broke a forearm bone, thus was out of action for this week's filming of a CBS-TV melodrama, The Brand of Jesse James, in which she was to play the bad man's grandma...
...book. The librettist (and stage director): Composer Gian Carlo (The Saint of Bleecker Street) Menotti, who writes the words for his own rousing operas, this time undertook to serve as librettist to his longtime friend Sam Barber. Menotti's yarn is like a pulse-bumping 19th century melodrama that lacks the courage of its afflictions. The lover, when he finally arrives, is not the man Vanessa was waiting for, but his son Anatol, a fatally charming young man who promptly seduces Vanessa's niece Erika. From there on the plot seems to thunder toward a traditional deathbed climax...
...room to do the rest of the show live. "Isn't that funny," exclaimed Betty, "after they move us out here because the facilities are so much better?" Unfortunately, Betty's commercials kept being interrupted by long stretches of something called Brotherhood of the Bell, a pretentious melodrama about a conspiratorial fraternity in 1976, which posed a question for the producers: Was it really worth making Betty pack those ten boxes of clothes and 18 pieces of luggage and leave her roomy apartment on Manhattan's smart East Side...
When you come right down to it, The Bridge on the River Kwai is only a war melodrama. Its only valid "meaning" is as a glorification of human courage. Its primary appeal is not to the understanding or the esthetic sense, but to whatever in us is receptive to sheer physical action. But as such, it is a very fine movie, a highly effective blend of tension and irony...