Word: melodrama
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Italian winegrower who woos a young waitress by mail, wins her by submitting his youthful foreman's photograph in place of his own. Though resentful of being tricked, she goes through with the marriage, only to sin with the foreman. The husband finds out, but reason prevails over melodrama because all three know what they really want-the Italian a wife, the girl a good home, the foreman his freedom...
Criss Cross (Universal International] is fairly routine gangster melodrama in which the hero (Burt Lancaster) is led into a whole mess of trouble by his alluring ex-wife (Yvonne de Carlo). But it is sharply directed by Robert Siodmak and enlivened with some fresh bits of business. Samples: a jug-nursing old gentleman (Alan Napier) who makes a specialty of planning complex holdups; the robbery of an armored car (in which Lancaster is a guard), a rare sport among real-life or cinema crooks; so much double-crossing that the cast almost needs military maps to remind them...
Cover Up (United Artists) is a doubtful little melodrama with a doubtful moral thesis: murder is excusable when the victim is an unpopular curmudgeon. The film's makers avoid an out & out tussle with the Johnston Office by killing off the murderer, a kindly old doctor, before Insurance Investigator Dennis O'Keefe can catch up with him. But, preoccupied with Dennis' courtship of a suspect's daughter (Barbara Britton), they blithely overlook the fact that a local banker was an accessory to murder and that Sheriff William Bendix shut his eyes to the crime. The rather...
Seldom, either, has there been such monotony of murder. The one-man reign of terror that ends with Richard's death on Bosworth Field not only demotes the play from tragedy to melodrama; it eventually gives horror the colorlessness of habit. Toward the end, Shakespeare's Richard III is very nearly as bad as Shakespeare's Richard...
Last week's production accepted, indeed courted, Richard as melodrama. Everything was painted in bold primary colors; a good deal was literally bathed in baleful crimson light. But the thing had pace and a certain crude excitement, and Richard Whorf's usurper, limping of foot and swift of brain, was enjoyably malign. There was nothing subtle about any of it, and toward the end there was much that was strident; but if never anything more, it was a pretty good show...