Word: melodrama
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...Burning Glass (by Charles Morgan) is one more melodrama in which a scientist discovers a new source of power -this time by harnessing the heat of the sun. Being the work of Charles Morgan, it is meant as far more-though at times it comes off as far less-than a mere thriller. The author of The Fountain is a stylishly earnest writer who, while posing philosophic debates over when the new weapon should be used, offers cultivated characters who spout Shakespeare and Keats and dress regularly for destruction...
...while Crome has been spinning a web around Stephen and his upcoming inheritance. Before the fly outwits the spider, drawing-room comedy gives way to drugstore melodrama, and no one is left to shed a tear for Hazeldon Crome except readers who cherish a well-turned rogue...
Such a string of ideas doesn't make matters particularly coherent or even faintly convincing. Worse yet, the play keeps shifting from romance to realism, from melodrama to comedy, and the heroine keeps going into moral huddles over the ethics of her inheritance. But she seems a pretty shabby creature for all that, with her abrupt shift of affections at the end, and not impressively moral for relinquishing one fortune in the act of marrying another...
...swallow the story itself. Although the script changes barley a line of the play, the film projects the drama on an infinitely broader canvas, interpolating speeches with artful flashbacks. As a result, Miss Julie dispels much of the tautness and unity of the play and frequently accentuates its dated melodrama. Whether a less imaginative transcription of Miss Julie would hold much interest for modern audiences is questionable, however. The place of Strindberg's picture of tormented souls in a transitional society is more secure in theatre history than in theatre repertoire. If, therefore, the film seems to overburden the story...
...novel as an attempt "to pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee." In true Dickens' fashion, she wrote about insufferable aunts, cruel schoolmasters, and orphans' asylums, and made them all as black as the corridors of Thornfield. But she added to her novel a vivid sense of melodrama, replete with thunderstorms, dark castles, and voices drifting across the moor...