Word: melodrama
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...more than half the way The Winter's Tale is harsh, high-busted melodrama. On flimsy grounds King Leontes of Sicilia (Henry Daniell) inflames his own imagination with insanely jealous suspicions of his Queen and Polixenes, King of Bohemia...
Scarlet Street (Diana Productions-Universal) is an ambitious melodrama bristling with fine directorial touches and expert acting. Its trouble is its painfully obvious story. Producer-Director Fritz Lang, frankly trying to repeat the success he had with The Woman in the Window, has used all the stock props of rough, tough melodrama in his new thriller. There is the sneering, dame-slapping heel of a hero (Dan Duryea), the bad girl (Joan Bennett) who asks to be slapped around and seems to enjoy it, and the frightened, henpecked little middle-aged cashier (Edward G. Robinson) with a simple-minded...
...Michael Todd) brought Maurice Evans back to Broadway in the shortened, sharpened version with which he wowed G.I.s in the Pacific. It is frankly a tough guy's Hamlet, with the Prince himself anything but a softie. It moves swiftly and mounts steadily with the crackle of great melodrama. It cuts boldly across whole scenes-there are no gravediggers, no "Alas, poor Yorick," no obsequies for Ophelia. It cuts boldly across time: Actor Evans has laid it in a 19th-Century Denmark of waltzes and tight trousers...
...anything embarrassingly mushy or heroic. No one has to crack any bad jokes: Characters are brought in without formal introduction and bowed out before the audience gets to know them well. Human relationships are indicated sharply but briefly. In trying to steer between war melodrama and straight documentary reporting, Expendable beats a middle course through waters that are too rough for speed...
...Grey (Gainsborough-Universal) is a heavily romantic, British-made melodrama tailored for the matinee trade. Adapted from a sugary, swashbuckling novel by the late Lady Eleanor Smith, it is a Regency costume piece containing all the time-tested materials: a gypsy fortuneteller; a scowling, black-browed villain; a gushy diary kept by a doe-eyed girl named Clarissa who munches candied violets; a wavy-haired hero with beautiful strong teeth; a fire-breathing adventuress who dotes on discord and low-cut gowns...