Word: melodrama
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...Woman In White (Warner), Wilkie Collins' mid-Victorian melodrama, has enough plot for a dozen ordinary movies-and a lot too much for one, unless that one is done brilliantly. This production is sound, rather than brilliant. Chunk by chunk it is patiently, intricately wrought and highly polished; but the chunks have to be shoved around like so many massive pieces of Victorian furniture. Those who made the film have taken a pretty good, but no longer very believable book a great deal too seriously. Treated with less respect, it might have been turned into a lively, believable movie...
Macbeth (by William Shakespeare; produced by Theatre, Inc., in association with Brian Doherty), fortunately for the theater, is a great melodrama as well as a great tragedy. For in the theater the great tragedy does not easily stand forth. Shakespeare's high-placed, higher-seeking, larger-than-life criminals cannot seem tragic unless they first seem very grand, and unless Macbeth, at least, comes to seem as much haunted as hounded. Probably few real murderers have looked into such caverns of the imagination as Macbeth; the whole play, indeed, is as suffused with poetry as it is stained with...
...Macbeth is still good melodrama. The next to shortest of Shakespeare's plays,* and certainly the scariest, it moves at top speed for three acts-from the first appearance of the Witches to the disappearance of Banquo's ghost. As Critic A. C. Bradley once pointed out, the fourth act of most very great Shakespeare (Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear) tends to slump. Last week's production slumps less than the play, and proceeds to a mighty laying-on of Macduff and a martial conclusion. Perhaps best of all, the new production catches an atmosphere of menace...
...dramatically overdone. Sartre's soft-soaping Senator, for instance, is pure burlesque, and too amusing to be alarming; the whole story is so charged with sex and suspense that it titillates rather than terrifies. But if Prostitute is no tocsin of social protest, it rings the bell as melodrama...
...Sign of the Ram (Columbia), a fair-to-middling melodrama about a pathological cripple, stars attractive Susan Peters playing her first part since she was crippled in an accident three years ago. As a scheming, power-mad young stepmother, she has quite a fat role, and deftly conceals its lack of genuine sinew behind her intense acting...