Word: melodrama
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...clear. There is a fantastic fencing fiesta at the end, staged by Mason and Granger, both fencers of the old school. The gallant does not get the girl, an excellent theory of the new school. Greed and honor, love and duty, chivalry and chauvanism clash on the field of melodrama. Good wins, as it should, but then, bad doesn't loose. The villain escapes, as he should and there are several beautiful women whose fates are left in doubt. All of which provides interesting speculation over one's post-pic beer...
...Melodrama and misadventure characterized the last week of Adlai Stevenson's campaign. Five days before the election, while whistle-stopping through the East, he got word that a riot among the convicts at Illinois' Menard state penitentiary was still out of hand. Interrupting his campaign, Stevenson flew off to the prison to watch, pale and tired, as armed state troopers routed out 300 rebellious prisoners who had barricaded themselves in a cell block. Governor Stevenson, who got to the scene in time to go over the plan of action with Lieutenant Governor Sherwood Dixon and other state officials...
Hurricane Smith (Nat Holt; Paramount) is a flurry of low melodrama on the high seas. Included in the excitement: pirates taking over a slave ship, a battle between the ship's officers and the shanghaied crew, a hunt for buried treasure in the South Seas, a fight between a shark and Hurricane Smith (John Ireland). Also aboard is an exotic half-Polynesian girl (Yvonne de Carlo) who does a native love dance on the deck of the pirate ship dressed in the sketchiest of sarongs...
Freedom of Soul. At one point the hearing came close to winding up as a melodrama. While Brooklyn College's Biology Professor Harry G. Albaum was testifying about his gradual seduction by the Communist Party, a hefty, ham-handed man slipped into a rear-row seat in the hearing room. Recognized by an alert committee aide as Constantin Radzie, who was born in Russia and became a U.S. citizen in 1937, the spectator was served with a quick subpoena and taken to the witness stand. Scowling like a wrestler, Radzie denied that he had been sent by the party...
...latest release, J. Arthur Rank has chosen a murderer and a little boy as the core of a touching melodrama with such a combination, the plot can easily decline into a painful concentration on psychological torture and an overly sentimental treatment of the child. The director, however, consciously avoided these pitfalls almost to the extent of robbing the film of speed and realistic emotion. Most of the time, the man and boy are escaping through tortuous fields and swamps, continuously avoided shepherds, bicyclers, and campers. The boy, Jon Whitely, fortunately saves this scene from being exasperating and boring. He doesn...