Word: melodrama
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Wild Melodrama . . ." As the testimony rambled on, industry spokesmen conjured up several novel defenses of their wares. Columbia's Jerry Wald asserted the right of U.S. moviemakers, unlike that of Soviet producers, to criticize their country's seamy side; Motion Picture Industry Councilman Lou Greenspan fell back on the Bible, where "murder, adultery, even incest are described." One movie adman piously explained, when Kefauver cited an advertisement showing two scantily clothed lovers grappling suggestively, that it could have been worse: "In the original [drawing] submitted to us they were clad only in beads. We at least put pants...
...distasteful (Olive turns out to be a nymphomaniac who believes that variety is the spice of love). But by novel's end, Jacy has found a Florister's one true love, the theater. A Book-of-the-Month Club choice for July, The Flower Girls sprouts eccentrics, melodrama, theater lore, subplots, flashbacks, deaths, alarums and excursions with engaging, old-fashioned abandon. Anyone who plans to while away a lazy summer afternoon with its 629 pages would do well to string up two hammocks, one for himself and another for the book...
...COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, by Warren Eyster (597 pp.; Random House; $4.95), is the slowest-starting melodrama since John Hersey covered umpteen pages before breaching The Wall. To fill his big picture of violence in a strike-torn Pennsylvania steel town, Novelist Warren Eyster starts 50 years back and paints all the ancestors as carefully as the main figures who finally dominate the canvas. Never relenting for so much as a chuckle, Novelist Eyster fastens his eye on personal as well as social change ("Irene had become a better person. She appeared to have learned that sacrifice was not necessarily...
Soldier of Fortune (20th Century-Fox) plays out its tiny melodrama against the vast, eye-filling CinemaScope backdrop of Hong Kong harbor. Incredible islands rise perpendicular from the blue sea, and fleets of fishing junks, like floating windmills, drift by on the tide. Ashore, the narrow streets are jammed with the swarming, anonymous humanity of Asia, while high up on green terraces gleam the flowered palaces of the rich...
...trouble started, Kerr thinks, nearly 80 years ago, when Ibsen, later abetted by Shaw and Chekhov, renounced melodrama and fancy-dress intrigues and ushered in a drama of photographic realism and socially significant content directed at an audience of intellectuals. Like any fresh theatrical cycle, Critic Kerr feels, the one Ibsen introduced gave new vitality to the stage of its time, but unlike the Greek or Elizabethan cycles, it reached its height in its originators, and has long since outlived its original artistic impulse: "The best new brains are feeding on dead tissue...