Word: melodrama
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...demonstration of how much deviltry can go into the fighting of devils, The Crucible is often grimly instructive. Many of its scenes have real theatrical power. The play at its best is hard-hitting sociological melodrama, though even here it would gain from fewer and more sharply aimed blows. And helped by performances from Arthur Kennedy, Walter Hampden, Beatrice Straight, E. G. Marshall and others, Jed Harris has staged the play with consistent though conventional vigor...
Where a work of art seems to operate at several levels, The Crucible seems made in several segments. It is in part a documentary (based, with some juggling, on 17th century facts), in part a parable with a 20th century application, in part a forthright melodrama. None of these constitutes a high form of art, and Miller, in binding them together, has provided force, but not artistic heightening. The material seems not there for the sake of the play, but the play for the sake of the material...
...with a kiss, and each may choose his own ideal time and place for the trial. Having kidded the colonels, Ustinov now kids their national drama. The Sleeping Beauty is wooed in vain in a French period comedy, an Elizabethan verse-play, a languid bit of Chekhov, a Hollywood melodrama...
...Night has an intermittent hard look and some fast gab. It hints at the violence of its theme in several harsh sequences and in the performance of Don Gordon as a street fighter. But only rarely does the real tawdriness of its subject come across. With its trumped-up melodrama, the movie is just another undernourished thriller about underprivileged youngsters...
Thunder in the East (Paramount). At one point in this oriental melodrama, one of the characters describes Alan Ladd as "Sir Galahad, Horatio at the bridge and Robin Hood, all wrapped up into one." The description is incomplete. Playing a rough & ready adventurer, Ladd lands in the Indian state of Gundahar with a planeload of guns and ammunition at a time when bandit forces are converging on the Maharajah's palace. The Maharajah's adviser (Charles Boyer), a Gandhi-like character, is an adamant believer in the virtues of nonresistance, an attitude which mystifies Ladd...