Word: melodrama
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...swift and sometimes brutal melodrama, The Dark Past makes a frank plea for sympathetic understanding, rather than harsh punishment, of young criminals. Smooth performances by Holden and Cobb put the point across without undue sentimentality...
There is no lack of either a mind or a theater mind in The Victors-it is as charged with ideas as with harsh melodrama. The fault, in fact, lies just that way-in a too-muchness of everything that becomes a form of melodrama in itself. In piling up too many motives, in piling on too much horror, the play loses its impact. The characters get to be much less human beings than mere Existencils; the ideas lack value because Sartre insists on using them as bombs rather than light bulbs. For all its intellectualism, The Victors...
...wrong with the movies, the critics paused long enough last week to pick the ten best of 1948. By week's end, four notable lists' had appeared. Only two films landed on all four lists: Sir Laurence Olivier's monumental Hamlet and Warner's melodrama, Johnny Belinda. 20th Century-Fox's shocker about insanity, The Snake Pit, placed on three lists (its late release missed the deadline for the fourth...
...great effort now was on proletarian fiction, published in the Communists' intellectual organ, the New Masses. His stories, full of romanticism and melodrama, were a summons to violence. Moscow was enraptured, cited him as "the first writer to introduce the Bolshevik into American writing...
...Gloves (adapted from the French of Jean-Paul Sartre by Daniel Taradash; produced by Jean Dalrymple) reached Broadway figuratively picketed by the man who wrote it. Sartre had, on hearsay, denounced the U.S. version as a "vulgar, common melodrama with an anti-Communist bias" (TIME, Dec. 6). Though he might justly complain of a translation and a production that (except for Charles Beyer's brilliant acting) are pretty wooden, Red Gloves itself seems pretty typical Sartre...