Word: melodrama
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Much of this material needlessly piles extra melodrama on the movie's sufficiently melodramatic subject so that the picture at times almost collapses from its own plot weight. Director & Co-Author Giuseppi (Bitter Rice) De Santis also injects an extraordinary amount of sex appeal into his picture, notably by having the better part of the 200 attractive accident victims strewed about on the collapsed staircase in various states of fetching disarray. But underneath all this excessive color, the picture has a hard bedrock of realism that props it up dramatically: it is an earnest, often eloquent indictment of social...
Desire) Kazan, the picture makes good use of its actual German backgrounds and its bizarre circus setting. But the characters are mostly sawdust figures in a stock movie melodrama. Fredric March, as the circus manager and clown tightrope-walker, gives an earnest performance that seems to recall a little too strongly his confused Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. Terry Moore as his bareback-riding daughter and Cameron Mitchell as a circus handyman in love with her are merely displaced Hollywood juveniles. Gloria Grahame as the circus manager's sultry young wife and Adolphe Menjou as a secret...
...Arthur Rank; Universal-International) is a British-made film that sets out to show the human side of the law. It succeeds in its aim all too well. Taking as its central characters a couple of probation officers attached to a London magistrates' court, the picture piles enough melodrama on its theme to convince even the most doubting moviegoer that probation officers and probationers are human, after...
...System (Warner) methodically goes through the steps of putting together a crime melodrama. But it has far too little action, is much too flabby and too gabby. The plot: a powerful newspaper publisher (Fay Roope) objects to his daughter (Joan Weldon) associating with Gambling Boss Frank Lovejoy. Things end fairly happily when Gangster Lovejoy, having come to the conclusion that "you can't run a clean sewer," spills all to a crime investigating committee and goes off to prison knowing that Joan will wait...
Desert Legion (Universal-International), a tepid melodrama set against the blazing sands of the Algerian desert, has no meteorologists, but it presents Alan Ladd as a French Foreign Legionnaire who stumbles on to a mysterious city named Madara, beyond a hidden pass in the Iraouen Mountains. Legionnaire Ladd never had it so good as he does in Madara. He takes the Algerian equivalent of a bubble bath, and is entertained by sword dancers while the emir's gorgeous, red-haired daughter (Arlene Dahl) feeds him sweetmeats by torchlight. Unfortunately, this pleasant state of affairs is menaced by a villain...