Word: melodrama
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Klondike Vein. A Wilber TV play is often spiced with Spillane-type violence: a flogging or a torture scene or a near-lynching. His heroines are outright symbols of purity, his villains 'are double-dyed, his heroes are properly heroic. A TV producer describes the typical Wilber melodrama as "a handling of clichés that somehow keeps the viewer from realizing he's watching clichés." Wilber's favorite author is Jack London but, he admits, "I've never read much of London or anyone else." He has seen only one stage play...
...first two acts-as 14-year-old Mary Tilford exerts her fearful wiles over schoolmates and grandmother and spreads her poison-The Children's Hour has the lure of mounting melodrama. It is with the last act that something at once harsher and more humane begins to blow through the story, and with the very last scene-when the surviving schoolmistress faces an enlightened, remorseful old lady-that the play takes on, emotionally and morally, a sense of the tragic...
...attacked by a black leopard during a hunting party, 2) almost immersed in an alligator pit, 3) thrown into a subterranean torture chamber, 4) prepared for burial alive. The Black Castle tries hard to chill the moviegoer's spine. Most of the time, however, this boy-meets-ghoul melodrama is only tepid theatrics...
...stock, which was at 4-⅝ only two months ago when the Stolkin group took control, was down to 3⅜. In Hollywood, at least, there was some activity on the RKO lot. Though the studio had no executive producer, it was starting production of Split Second, a melodrama, the first to get under way in seven months...
...worthy effort to avoid trumped-up melodrama, The Brave Don't Cry sometimes seems barren of drama as well. Though it does not dig into its theme as deeply as the German Kameradschaft (1931) and the British The Stars Look Down (1939), it mines its particular dramatic vein, i.e., the ennobling dignity of man's courage, with honesty and fidelity...