Word: melodrama
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Night Has a Thousand Eyes (Paramount), a smooth-surfaced, creaky-jointed melodrama, stars Edward G. Robinson as a vaudeville "mentalist" who finds, to his embarrassment, that his clairvoyant gift is genuine. He feels so helplessly responsible for the catastrophes he foresees that he cannot bear to cash in on his remarkable powers. He disappears into the depths of Los Angeles, leaving his fiancee (Virginia Bruce) to marry his partner (Jerome Cowan). Just as he could predict, Virginia dies in childbirth and Jerome makes money hand over fist...
...convicted Nazi general really guilty? The question stirs some qualms in his idealistic prosecutor, a U.S. Army major (Ray Milland). Major Milland's search for the facts might have turned up some interesting moral issues-or at least some effective melodrama. Instead, there is only a sort of slow-motion cops & robbers chase in an uncertain direction. By the time Milland's search is patly ended, even the realistic backgrounds have begun to take on a phony look...
Shakespeare's Macbeth is a turbulent melodrama, full of spooky claptrap, but its central figure gives it the dignity of classic tragedy. Welles has kept the claptrap, but his Macbeth is no once-honorable soldier whose muddled aspirations trap him into a crime against himself (the murder of King Duncan, in the play, also destroys the murderer's ability to live with himself). Orson has robbed the play of tragic impact by substituting a conniving heel who kills as he climbs...
...TIME, Sept. 27). Unfortunately for Senhor Villa-Lobos, Magdalena seems like its librettists' first encounter with Broadway. They have loaded their book with all the stock melodrama of opera and the seediest monkeyshines of operetta; they have lavished on South America all the tritest features of the tropics and the Balkans. The only thing more incomprehensible than the plot is the notion that any one could follow it. It is a mess of pagan rites, political wrongs, an opera bouffe general (Hugo Haas), vociferous emerald miners, and the love of a bus driver (John Raitt) for a high-born...
Mine Own Executioner. Perceptive melodrama, with Burgess Meredith as a preoccupied psychiatrist (TIME...