Word: melodrama
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...Largo (Warner), with which Writer-Director John Huston follows Treasure of Sierra Madre (TIME, Feb. 2), is no match for that magnificent picture. But as intelligent melodrama it is very good and as moviemaking it is one of the best pictures of the year...
...Largo has one grave weakness. Through the thinnest possible mask of melodrama, it is trying to speak to everyone in the postwar world who is disheartened; to show how a brave and intelligent man can and must regain reasons for living and for fighting. In this admirable attempt, it succeeds only part way. It may be that gangsters simply cannot be made to symbolize enough...
...most careful not to say. They do their grim talking in dining rooms and nurseries which the author hardly ever describes, but which Critic Edward Sack-ville-West has neatly termed "embowered, rook-enchanted concentration camps." The persevering reader will find that the sum total of all this artifice, melodrama and incredible behavior is a warm, witty, profoundly tragic portrait of married and family life...
Farrebique and Schoolgirl Diary make a peculiar duo at the Old South. The former is a remarkable French semi-documentary about a year of peasant life, while the latter finds new-Hollywoodized Alida Valli in carlier, or schoolgirl, costume in a poor-to-middling melodrama...
Sometimes World Without Visa trembles on the edge of ten-twent'-thirt' melodrama, sometimes it seems incongruously romantic in its motivations. But all such objections are ultimately swept aside by the power with which Malaquais has raised a verbal monument to the martyrdom of Europe...