Word: melodrama
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...Closing Door (by Alexander Knox; produced by Cheryl Crawford) is melodrama that raids psychopathology for its thrills. What its door is closing on, with what threatens to be a deafening bang, is the sanity of the hero. Sullen, suspicious, harrowed by dark memories, Vail Trahern (Alexander Knox) can still, after a quieting talk with his wife (Doris Nolan), agree to go to a sanitarium for treatment. Then, thrown off balance again, he runs off, has somebody else turn up at the sanitarium in his name, and steals back home to precipitate a ghastly mess...
Seldom has a melodrama flashed so many tricks of the trade-pianos, radios, telephones, striking clocks, blinking lights, swinging doors, even false statements in the program. Yet The Closing Door is much more seriously written than the usual thriller and is full of clinical detail and therapeutic advice, some of it Freud and some of it scrambled. If this adds to the weight of the play, it only proves, in terms of good melodrama, a dead weight. Toward the end, however, as the adolescent events that poisoned Vail's life emerge simultaneously with the frightful method he took...
Slackly written and strewn with loose ends, the melodrama is robbed of much of its inherent tension by overacting. But it has a variety of unpretentious and believable sets (notably those around its drugstore corner) put together by someone who knew sidestreet architecture and atmosphere. By even so modest a merit-and by trying to be nothing more than the slight time killer it is-Tension manages to be more entertaining than some of Hollywood's grander products...
...since 1937, except for a year with Eva Le Gallienne and Margaret Webster running the ill-fated American Repertory Theater, Producer Crawford hunts tirelessly for scripts that offer "something different." Now on her schedule: a melodrama, a musical and a new Paul Green adaptation of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, starring John Garfield...
...agreement with the Czech government, procuring Messerschmits which were manufactured at a Scoda plant outside of Prague and flown in bigger planes to Palestine. The Israell also operated several Piper cubs, and increased their air power even further when a group of Beaufighters which were to provide the melodrama in an English movie disappeared from their British field and arrived in Israel...