Word: melodrama
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...into a long and brutal film. If you can stand more than an hour of South Sea cruelty on the high seas, you might be able to suffer this--but even discarding the brutality, it has lost most of the documentary qualities of the original in the rush for melodrama. Alan Ladd and Brian Donlevy star...
...this brother of Taylor's who must never be mentioned? Like the audience, Katy has never met .the mysterious relative whose name drives Taylor into queer fits of hysterical reticence. Unlike the audience, she is consumed with curiosity and foreboding about her missing inlaw. Amid some embarrassing melodrama, it begins to look as if Taylor is a scoundrel, maybe a murderer, and-worst fate of all-the short side of a romantic triangle...
...corn-colored stock characters of oldtime. Wild West melodrama are on hand. All of them are nicely preserved. Henry Fonda, as the half-reluctant, pistol-packing marshal of booming, lawless Tombstone, could hardly be better. Victor .Mature, who used to wander aimlessly through slick-haired juvenile roles before his 41-month hitch in the Coast Guard, actually does some acting as the dipsomaniac doctor-turned-renegade. Linda Darnell (a brunette for the last time before dyeing her hair honey-blonde to play Amber) is the lushly pretty dance-hall tart...
Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith's 1915 melodrama featuring Lillian Gish, carpetbagging and Ku Kluxing in the Old South, has been voluntarily shelved by the Museum. Film Library officials, recalling that the picture started race riots in 1915 and again in 1921, admit the "greatness of the film" and "its artistic and historic importance." But because of "the potency of its anti-Negro bias . . . exhibiting it at this time of heightened social tensions cannot be justified." Students are advised that Birth of a Nation is still in the Museum's files and gets "limited circulation...
...lost something, of course; but much of its humor still clicked and much of its melodrama still crackled. It caught the atmosphere of a press room in the days when all reporters were cynics and when Chicago's chief industry was crime. Its profanity had not dated, though it no longer seemed daring...