Word: melodrama
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...wedding night that his wife is pregnant. French and Italian moviemakers, who use the facts of life as story staples, might work such a situation for drama or comedy. Having ventured to deal with it at all, Hollywood typically uses it as a clever gimmick in a superior melodrama...
...movie's treatment of the political maneuvering is unconvincingly hazy, and its melodrama slow. But plenty is left of the love affair, and Director Jean (God Needs Men) Delannoy makes it no less romantic than it was in Mayerling...
...gaudy melodrama, written by six anonymous authors, of whom Mao may be one. It portrays the suffering of Heroine Hsi-erh, a landless farmer's daughter, who is tortured by the landlord's mother, raped by the landlord's son, etc., etc. Her ordeal turns her hair prematurely white. The Red army finally rescues her and punishes the wicked landlord family...
...Ferrer) is an unexpectedly bright little knickknack, considering the nature of its subject and the lateness of the season. Set in a Nazi prison barracks full of U.S. airmen, toward the end of World War II, it mixes a good deal of earthy comedy with lively if commonplace melodrama. Somebody in the barracks is plainly blabbing the prisoners' small secrets to the Nazis. And when there is something really serious to blab about - when a new prisoner confides that he set a Nazi train on fire - the informer's identity becomes crucial...
Oliver Twist is long (1 hr. 45 min.) and rich enough to spare the cuts. Directed by David Lean and produced by Ronald Neame, the British team responsible for 1947's superb Great Expectations, the movie recreates the novel's pungent brew of harshly realistic detail, extravagant melodrama, sordid depravity and sentimental warmth. Between the dreary, bare-brick expanse of the parish workhouse where Oliver begins life as an orphan and the elegant Brownlow mansion where he finally takes his rightful place, the settings and costumes summon up all but the smells of Britain's lower depths...