Word: melodrama
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Breaking Point. A stinging melodrama based on Hemingway's To Have and Have Not; with John Garfield, Patricia Neal, Phyllis Thaxter (TIME, Sept...
...Motta suddenly saw an opening, fired his first good salvo of the evening. A right hook caught Dauthuille flush on the jaw, gave ringside cameramen one of the finest knockout pictures of the season (see cut). Jake's sudden come-alive finish left some sportwriters unimpressed ("manufactured melodrama," one called it), but it saved Jake's title by the barest of margins: the fight had only 13 seconds to go when Dauthuille was counted...
Director Michael Curtiz sparks The Breaking Point's slambang action with realistic, underplayed sequences of growing tension. Besides stinging melodrama, the film offers some unusual dividends. Its love story involves the hero with-of all people-his wife, and it is played with a passion that U.S. movies never seem to find in married couples who have school-age children. In the other woman (Patricia Neal), who gets nowhere with Morgan, the script fashions an acid, quip-studded portrait of a smart tart on the make...
...Good melodrama succeeds in making its characters and plot believable. When they are not, one way for moviemakers to try for some credibility is to take the camera to the actual scene of the fictitious crime. Latest examples...
Mystery Street. Harvard joins the police in some scientific crime detection that makes for absorbing melodrama; with Ricardo Montalban (TIME...