Word: melodrama
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...calliope shrieked; the twelve-piece band blared; the popcorn vendors hawked their wares. On stage, the actors hammed their way through Ten Nights in a Barroom. It was melodrama at its drammiest that was being performed in an Ohio river port last week. And that was just the way the professor wanted it. Professor Harry Wright of Ohio's Kent State University had gone to a lot of trouble to get the right atmosphere...
Woven through this melodrama is the complex story of the psychiatrist himself, his professional work and private fevers. He is neither miracle man nor mad scientist, as Hollywood so often presents men of his trade. The audience can respect his talents while fearing for his fallibility. There is ham in him, and cold conceit, as he changes face and voice from one patient to the next. He mistreats his wife and dallies with a blonde (Christine Norden), unhappily wondering why he can't be as useful to himself as he is to some of his patients. In short...
...this is told in a graceful, leisurely prose which gives Bridie Steen an oldfashioned, 19th Century quality found in few recent novels. But even on so quaint a dish, novelists today would not dare to serve up so cloying a mixture of Irish whimsy, gooey romance and tear-jerking melodrama...
...Margy Shannon of Maujer Street, the plainly dressed, neatly combed daughter of a factory worker, of her loves, job and marriage, the tragedy of her life (her child is born dead), and the beginning of her separation from her husband. It is so flatly written and so free of melodrama (or even of exciting incidents) that its interest is surprising-without plot and without particular distinction in its prose, with characters who seem merely to have wandered on the scene, it is nevertheless absorbing...
...course, that Author Greene shares with some of his readers the sentimental view of Scobie as a hero-without quotation marks. It seems more probable that he tried to write a true tragedy and succeeded in writing a suggestive melodrama, with tragic overtones and ironic implications...