Word: melodrama
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...jury indictment told the story, were his deputy, Lieut. Colonel Reino Hayhanen (cover name: "Vic"), and three others-Vitali G. Pavlov, onetime Soviet embassy official in Ottawa; ex-United Nations employee Mikhail Svirin; Aleksandr Mikhailovich Korotkov. For nine years Colonel Abel and his fellow spies played a deadly serious melodrama. They met at prearranged rendezvous, e.g., Manhattan's Tavern-on-the Green and a Newark railroad station, and exchanged or left messages and microfilmed documents, tapped in on telephone lines to make untraceable calls. They banked hefty sums of money around New York City under various aliases...
...booze, and the symbolical death -Brennan falls from the height of Gaudi's grotesque unfinished Barcelona Church of the Holy Family. It is all pretty thick stuff, but an angry, eloquent passion against the paralyzing Red ticks in Europe's soft underbelly redeems it from mere melodrama...
Johnston not only disapproves of realism but also lashes out against the Stanislavsky method of acting. "The illusion of realism in the theatre is one of the biggest illusions of all. The slice of life is no more real than melodrama, which is considered outdated. To tell the actor to go out on the stage and imagine he's wrestling with an alligator is useless except in a play such as Peter Pan, which is not in the Stanislavsky tradition...
Most horrifying of all (to a novelist), Pinfold hears a man called Clutton-Cornforth reviewing his books on the BBC: "The basic qualities of a Pinfold novel . . . may be enumerated thus: conventionality of plot; falseness of characterization; morbid sentimentality; gross and hackneyed farce alternating with grosser and more hackneyed melodrama; cloying religiosity...
...less its author will know about what he has written. Library statistics show that more has been written about Jesus, Hamlet and Napoleon than any other persons. Shakespeare didn't know what he had created. He probably thought to himself, 'I'll wow 'em with a court melodrama about the highest classes with the lowest morals, in which everyone gets killed...