Word: melodrama
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...trouble with the work of Terence Rattigan, one of Britain's leading playwrights since 1936, is that he frequently says what he thinks is clever instead of saying what he means. The method works fairly well in blazer farce and weekend melodrama, but when it comes to hearing the human heartbeat of a situation, Rattigan might as well be hunting uranium with an ear trumpet. Moreover, in The Deep Blue Sea, the leading lady does little to help. The part is scored, though crudely, for the full cello notes of womanly anguish; Vivien plays it in the thin pizzicato...
...Melodrama is a fairly disreputable form of art, and in most cases the sneers of the critics are well earned. The practitioners of this sort of drama usually worry only about stimulating the adrenalin glands of their audiences, while asking them to leave their minds at home. Joseph Hayes, who adapted his original novel both as a play and as the present movie, is different. He knew how to write a well-sustained thriller; but when the shock of that wears off, he leaves the viewer with the sense that the film says something true about the way man thinks...
...Desperate Hours (Paramount) is a thriller that jabs so shrewdly and sharply at sensibility that the moviegoer's eye might feel that it has not so much been entertained as used for a pincushion. But to melodrama fans, it may prove one of the most pleasurably prostrating evenings ever spent in a movie house...
...Broadway critic called the play "an almost perfect melodrama." The movie lacks a few of the psychological grace notes of the play, but Author Hayes has written a meller with the coiling continuity of a whiplash, and a savage snapper at the end of it. Producer-Director William Wyler has the capacity to see the whole of a motion picture in one flash across the private screen of imagination; and into this sense of the whole he can interpolate ornament-all kinds of human dado and humoristic acanthus-with a skill that gives spontaneity to the grand design without collapsing...
Deadening Fear. Apparently Perón had several aims in staging his melodrama : to whip up his followers' flagging loyalty, excuse his scrapping of "pacification," scare the opposition meeting-holders and leaflet-passers. Most important, perhaps, he may have wanted to forestall any new military move to get rid of him by reminding the high brass-especially in the navy and air force-that he can still draw big, ugly crowds to the Plaza de Mayo...