Word: melodrama
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...Menotti score, composed for small orchestra (25 pieces), was always distinctive if not always distinguished. As in The Medium, Menotti proved himself a master at writing Puccini-like melodrama and composing melody with Puccini-like appeal. His hair-raising stage directions-touches such as the smashing of a window-pane-startled listeners more than once. And he had not lost any of his flair for the macabre: in one scene, a magician hypnotizes his fellow visa-seekers, commands them into an eerie waltz in the consulate office. In Magda's dying dream, the same characters dance again in coffin...
...three wartime years with her small son in a North Borneo prison camp. Unfortunately, however, the makers of this film have placed an undue emphasis on the spectacular and more terrifying aspects of Mrs. Keith's imprisonment and, in doing so, have underplayed realism for the sake of melodrama...
Black Hand (MGM) is a minor triumph of production over plot. A slow, overlong melodrama about the bomb-throwing extortionists who terrorized Manhattan's Little Italy around the turn of the century, the story is so familiar that it might be a rehearsal for a movie about gangsters of a later era. But the film's vivid sets, new faces and, most of all, richly atmospheric photography help to give it a fresh look...
Stage Fright (Warner) is a comedy melodrama that most moviemakers could be proud of. For Director Alfred Hitchcock, who must compete with his own overpowering reputation, it is something less. Far superior to his recent, blighted Under Capricorn, it is hardly in the running with such oldtime Hitchcock classics as The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes...
Even so, coming from the director who once doted on torturing his audiences with suspense, it is a disappointing film. At its best, melodrama should gull the spectator into believing what he sees, if only while he is seeing it. In working out Stage Fright's intriguing premise, Hitchcock tortures his story more than his audience, burdens them both with too obvious a load of improbabilities...