Word: melodrama
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...writ of habeas corpus (with a 774-page opinion) freeing Roger from prison, where he had served only 21 years of a 99-year sentence. Judge Barnes said that Roger had been railroaded on a charge of kidnaping Jake ("The Barber") Factor, another character in the '20s' melodrama of crime, which either was or was not more real than a Slavic folk tale...
...Waterfront. Elia Kazan's big-shouldered melodrama of dockside corruption: with Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint, Lee J. Cobb (TIME...
...Waterfront (Horizon; Columbia) is an attempt by a master director, Elia Kazan, to develop heroic, classic-style drama out of dockside thuggery and union corruption. Kazan succeeds in producing a shrewd piece of screen journalism, a melodrama in the grand manner of Public Enemy and Little Caesar. But he fails to do anything more serious-largely because he tries too hard. In searching for the general meaning in little lives, Director Kazan has trained his lens down fine on small events; he has too often watched his characters through the magnifying glass of special prejudice-the old sentimental prejudice that...
...over 35, it was the first great meeting with history, the first passionate political love affair-or hate binge. Scores of keen-eyed witnesses, including Britain's late George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia (TIME, May 19, 1952), have shown that the war was not a simple melodrama of Franco vice v. Loyalist virtue, but a far more complex tragedy in which the Loyalist side itself fought a kind of civil war within a civil war, being first championed and then betrayed by the Communists. Many a sentimental liberal has since learned his lesson and lost the illusions...
...Talent for Isolation. But Bowers damages his case immeasurably by overstating it. Essentially, he is retelling the same old preposterous melodrama. In his account, only Franco bombs and bullets ever kill women and children, only Franco soldiers ever murder their prisoners, only the Franco side ever lies. Frequently, Author Bowers sounds more like a pamphleteer than a competent historian, e.g., "It is ironical that the diplomatic representative of every nation soon to be trodden neath the iron heel of Hitler was openly smiling on the totalitarian crusade against democracy in Spain." Bowers writes much better when he is telling...