Word: melodrama
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Deep Are the Roots (by Arnaud d'Usseau & James Gow; produced by Kermit Bloomgarden & Ge"brge Heller) is a bad play that is yet worth seeing. Artistically it is crude; psychologically quite false. But as melodrama it proves lively theater, as social drama it provokes thought; and the production has much of the skill that is wanting in the play...
...melodrama in Deep Are the Roots saves the evening but spoils the play. Until the Senator turns so viciously on Brett, he is portrayed as an unthinking -but not at all unfeeling - reactionary. Hence, the authors suddenly seem as much out to frame him as he is out to frame Brett. Time & again, in fact, they butcher character in order to build up plot. Result: their melodrama, which could have vivified their social drama, merely vitiates...
...melodrama alone does not spoil Deep Are the Roots. The play takes on too much and roves too widely. The sharp, immediate problem of the returning Ne gro soldier gradually becomes blurred by almost all the chronic interracial conflicts of the South, including the last one likely to prove dangerous, intermarriage...
...captain full of Elizabethan gusto; on Stagnation's side is the heroine's aunt (Catherine Willard), a snooping spinster full of Victorian gentility. The trouble with such highly contrasted symbols is that they themselves are virtually burlesques: almost everything the old maid does smacks of melodrama, almost everything the old soak does smacks of farce...
Bewitched (M.G.M.) is a double-personality melodrama with double-medium antecedents. Directed by radio's Arch Oboler, who adapted it from his own "best original air drama of 1938," the picture both gains and loses by its crossbreeding : the dialogue and sound track are so urgent and explicit, and what transpires on the screen so comparatively conventional, that you could get the whole show with your eyes shut. Even so, it makes a rather interesting movie. The story...