Word: melodrama
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...Lucrezia Borgia? To the incurable readers of melodrama and Sunday supplements, a woman of glowing and undimmed evil, literally the great femme fatale (usually poison) of the Italian Renaissance.* To modern historians, who have been quietly rehabilitating her, Lucrezia was a good deal less lurid but still deplorable: a woman who probably poisoned no soup herself but weakly watched the other Borgias doing such things...
...melodrama of this sort, Gabin's realistic touches provide an ironic contrast to Pepe's fanciful vision of freedom. The depraved gangster, trapped by both police and conscience, is forced to hide in the friendly surroundings of the native quarter. Ultimately his love for freedom and for the jeweled Gaby draws him from the safety of the Casbah to the dangers of the city. But even Pepe's love is evil, for Gaby is the mistress of another man. Gabin plays the part frankly and sadistically, yet he ended on a note of pathos, emotional enough for melodrama, and ironic...
These episodes are the exception in a film which skillfully used reality to supplement melodrama. Although opportunities for exaggeration and heroic scenes are available, Mireille Balin as Gaby, and Line Noro as the jealous native Ines, help preserve the film's subdued brutality not only in their acting, but in their hard, brittle appearance. The result is the original Casbah adventure, still perhaps the most exciting in a long series of copies...
Dead Pigeon by Lenard Kantor is a three-character melodrama that is constructed like a superhighway: the audience is never in any doubt where the play is going; it is beautifully landscaped by Joan Lorring in various stages of undress, and -though everything moves along briskly enough-there is a certain sensation of monotony...
...play about high deeds in the U.N. is a pretty strong argument for permitting bars in theatres. Though the authentic setting, with elegant committee room and scurrying plenipotentiaries, is admirable, the play conveys with appalling faithfulness the tedium of the average U.N. session. The opening scene promises a melodrama dressed in the intriguing cutaway of international incident. Once the curtain has fallen, however, on the unique spectacle of the French and British U.N. delegates sneaking a corpse out of the U.S. delegate's apartment, the play rolls on like a tumbrel through scenes which seem to bore even the actors...