Word: melodrama
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...Number (by Arthur Carter; produced by Paul Vroom & Irving Cooper) has faults galore, but one very respectable virtue: it keeps its audience interested. Without offering anything very new, Playwright Carter has built up a good situation for melodrama, thrown in some characters that are tough, some twists that are lively, and even a surprise or two. In more expert hands, The Number might have excited audiences instead of merely interesting them...
...year-old hoodlum personifying pure evil, and in the religious conflict within the simple waitress who loved him. Except for a single refinement of the book's final irony, the movie treats its characters wholly on the surface. The result looks enough like a second-rate U.S. crime melodrama to make the new title seem an accurate label. Brighton Rock loses its soul when young Scarface becomes just another descendant of Chicago's Scarface...
...extended dialogue, pyrotechnically it constitutes a splendid show. There are drawbacks: like almost everything of Shaw's, the Hell Scene could be shorter. But the characters score their points like polished duelists, flash their rhetoric like master showmen, make ideas hiss and coil and spring like creatures of melodrama. There are drawbacks to the performers, too: Charles Boyer's decided French accent and Charles Laughton's occasional tendency to ham. But in general, the quartet offers fine ensemble playing, with Boyer a magnetic Juan, Laughton a suavely smiling Devil...
Bannerline (MGM) is a limp little melodrama about a brash cub reporter (Keefe Brasselle) who, to cheer up the dying days of an idealistic teacher (Lionel Barrymore), bestirs a town to clean up its gangster-ridden government. Cast inevitably as a crotchety but lovable tyrant, Actor Barrymore gets a chance to play a deathbed scene which, running intermittently through the whole picture, must be the longest on record...
...great gush of doom. The glare of fusees mixes menacingly with the sweet smell of floating gasoline. Debris swims silently downstream to clog up on the bridges, finally carry them away. A privy goes by, "pivoting slowly like a model in a fashion parade." Fleming conveys the protracted melodrama of a bold, restless river in flood without once raising his voice adjectivally or using the verb "rampage...