Word: melodrama
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...adapted from Emile Zola's Therese Raquin by Thomas Job; produced by Victor Payne-Jennings & Bernard Klawans) is a dark brown, 19th-Century melodrama of crime and self-punishment. Thérèse Raquin (Eva LeGallienne), married to a stuffy, sickly, mamma's boy Paris milliner, is madly in love with a painter named Laurent (Victor Jory). She eggs Laurent into doing her husband in by way of a boating "accident" on the Seine...
...such spurts. Its classic plot can never be entirely dull, but Playwright Job has made things seem unnecessarily oldfashioned. As sheer melodrama, Thérèse doesn't pump up enough action; otiose characters keep chattering their heads off. It doesn't pack enough suspense: there is no taut atmosphere of guilty tongue-slips and sharp, suspicious glances...
Lacking real tragedy or psychological depth, the melodrama seems cut from cardboard. Thérèse, a presumably passionate and strong-willed woman, seems anemic compared to her sister connivers at murder; she lacks the hard fascination of Ruth Snyder quite as much as the grand villainy of Lady Macbeth...
Beyond a forceful presentation of his political views, Shaw has written a first-rate play. Not only is it an excellent, if colored, version of the intrigue behind the assassination of Darlan, but Shaw has used the best features of melodrama without its stagnant sentimentality and typed characterization...
...Edgar Hoover's G-men saved the day is the tense story of The House on 92nd Street. The desperate goings-on centering around an inconspicuous Manhattan brownstone building (run by talented Swedish Actress Signe Hasso) escape the routine of cloak-&-dagger melodrama by their realism...