Word: melodrama
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...Melodrama is doing for movies today what it did for theatres at the century's turn -- saving them. When writers get lost in the cliches of their trade, and find it easiest to guide well-known characters through well-known roles, then producers give their writers an extended vacation and dig into their files under...
...ploy usually works since audiences enjoy melodrama. Change the century's villain from a landlord to the communists, the hero from a farm boy to the F.B.I., the issue from this month's rent to atom bomb secrets, and a skillful director can guide unknown actors toward familiar outcomes to the satisfaction of everyone involved. Jerry Hooper is one skillful director...
...Outcasts of Poker Flat, it would require copious use of an opium pipe to discover any further similarities between the film and the Bret Harte story of the same moniker. This is not to say that the net result isn't mildly diverting, which it is, though the melodrama gets a little sticky around the fourth reel...
High Treason. Spies v. Scotland Yard in a bang-up British melodrama (TIME...
Though played on a larger stage, High Treason is not quite so dynamic as Seven Days to Noon. The screenplay sometimes bogs down in low melodrama, and the pace lags now & then for wordy political digressions. But in Boulting's camera-wise direction the picture mostly crackles with pseudo-documentary excitement. The spectacular climax, as the saboteurs try to take over massive Battersea power station, was filmed at the actual locale among a futuristic welter of catwalks, dynamos and generating equipment. And Director Boulting gives the fanciful plot a realistic look with the odd British types who get tangled...