Word: melodrama
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...Sebastians, the latest starring vehicle for Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, is a theatrical halfbreed described by its authors as "a melodramatic comedy." There is nothing intrinsically bad about such a combination, but Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse give the impression that they really wanted to write either a melodrama or a comedy, but that they are uncertain about how to bring the union about. As a result, their play is neither very funny nor very exciting...
Rebel Without a Cause (Warner) is a reasonably serious attempt, within the limits of commercial melodrama, to show that juvenile delinquency is not just a local outbreak of tenement terror but a general infection of modern U.S. society...
...acting, the play has scenes of frightening power. But it highlights the behaviorism of junkies rather than the psychology, and ends up more a scare piece than a genuine study. Its naturalistic manner is drapery rather than flesh; it simply gives a New Look and a domestic air to melodrama. The melodrama itself is never stinted: the dope peddlers, for example, pay off as theater but bulk much too large for a serious problem play...
...time as Liberace is today, and besides he was a careless dresser. Liberace decided to "insist that all the different facets of my personality ... be included in the picture." As a result, the Beethoven story seems to have been combined with the plot of a well-known melodrama, The Man Who Played God. Liberace could now express his musical talents as Beethoven, and satisfy his dramatic instincts in a part played by George Arliss. Even so, there were some "facets" left over. Liberace listed them: "Joy, sorrow, faith, love of family, love of children, and honesty." Obviously, a third theme...
Inhabiting Playwright Bagnold's Sussex manor house are a self-indulgent, irresponsible dowager who exerts a Lady Macbeth manner on trifles, her adolescent granddaughter who indulges in mischief and fabricates melodrama, a rather Shavian manservant who cannot bear being criticized, and upstairs, dying, a butler who for 40 years has ruled the household. Into it, as a companion for the granddaughter, comes a primly dressed woman with a superb and transforming knowledge of gardens, a gift for ingratiating herself with people, and an obviously beclouded past. How beclouded is made clear when a judge (Percy Waram...