Word: melodrama
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Jean-Paul Sartre was brooding about the U.S. version of his new play Red Gloves. It had been corrupted, he grumbled from Paris, into a "vulgar, common melodrama with an anti-Communist bias," and he wanted to see and approve a copy of the script before the show officially opened. Nonsense, snorted Producer Jean Dalrymple from Boston, where the show was trying out. The Sartre play had only been shortened, and besides, it was being rewritten all the time. And what's more, she added, Boston had given it "wonderful, wonderful reviews," and it would open in Manhattan this...
...thorny and bewildering life can be: an endless emotional seesaw, a constant moral crossroads. It understands, too, how snobbish institutions like Brook Valley help strangle decent impulses. Unfortunately it has not let bad enough alone, but has gone at ticklish human problems with the red hot pincers of melodrama, and has so loaded itself down with wiles and theatrics that it finally caves in. There is so much plot that there is no real plight; the words, like the deeds, smack at times of garish melodrama...
...Kissing Bandit (MGM) pokes some good-humored fun at the buskin-and-bluster heroes of costume melodrama. The picture itself is only a costume piece, with a little vaudeville thrown in. Its best features are the broad comedy by J. Carroll Naish, the sentimental songs sung by Frank Sinatra and Kathryn Grayson, and some lively Spanish dances...
...liberator and deliberator. At its strongest, in the well-acted clashes between Denmark and George, the play becomes resonant and vivid. But, itself a slave to history, it sprawls and jerks across twelve years and ten scenes, and, lacking a center, becomes a lumpy mixture of chronicle, drama, melodrama and tragedy. What is most effective is the conflict between the two men, but what arouses most interest is the conflict within one of them. The main trouble is that the play seems "written," that it lacks the body heat of reality...
Back Streets of Paris (Jacques Feyder-Film Rights International). Basically, this is merely a French-made gangster melodrama, but it has some wry Gallic nourishes. Example: the downtrodden Cinderella of the film (Andrée Clement) is not rewarded with the Prince Charming (Jacques Dacqmine), who runs off with a flashy tart. Instead, she gets a profitable little hotel business, and seems perfectly content with the bargain...