Word: melodrama
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Strangers on a Train. Alfred Hitchcock's implausible but dazzlingly tricky melodrama about a psychopath (the late Robert Walker) with a new scheme for foolproof murder (TIME, July...
Ivor Novello, a biography by Peter Noble, British theater historian, does full, sometimes fulsome, credit to its flamboyant subject, and tells a success story as pat as any Novello melodrama...
Peking Express (Hal Wallis; Paramount) sets out on a topical excursion into Communist China, but quickly turns into a typical train-borne melodrama, running on the same tracks as 1932's Shanghai Express. For all its world-shaking airs and its batting around of ideological platitudes, the picture carries (and is carried by) the standard load of sinister passengers scheming at cross-purposes, and the hero's burp gun has the last word...
...with a hot iron, and earmarks Corinne for what was regarded in some circles, back in the days when this plot was young, as the fate worse than death. In the carnage that rights these wrongs, Peking Express seems to prove only that human life in this type of melodrama is almost as cheap as in China itself...
Most of the lesser characters of this gloomy melodrama are skillfully played by members of the Brattle company. Albert Marre plays a director with effective, quiet irony. Robert Fletcher plays a composer who is a fine comic creation in the first scene and an intensely serious fellow in the tenth. This may be inconsistent, but Fletcher is enjoyable anyhow. Thayer David struts and declaims and is entirely amusing as a ham actor...