Word: melodrama
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Chicago, which saw some 50 performances of Frankie and Johnnie as a WPA Federal Theater project, had pronounced it a "wow" and as "native as a ballgame." Eastern balletomanes, seeing it for the first time last week, plunged into heated controversy about the strutting, nonclassical acrobatics and gun-toting melodrama. Critics couldn't agree on whether it was "good, lusty folklore" or merely a "dirty show...
Patrick Hamilton, creator of "Angel Street," wrote a plausible psychological murder in "Hangover Square." Hollywood's "Hangover Square" tries hard to be a big, had horror picture, and it would probably not have succumbed to maudlin melodrama in the grips of the original story...
...photography is the most interesting thing about RKO's quite unoriginal "Experiment Perilous." Seeing things extremely realistically throughout, the camera in many spots has captured the flat, faded look of old daguerreotypes to give this period melodrama authentic flavor. The plot, based on a novel by Margaret Carpenter, and actually a direct steal from "Angel Street" ("Gaslight"), is, by its asked repetition, the picture's most salient fault...
...film gets away with this startling argument against the sanctity of unhappy marriage by playing the whole business as period melodrama (London, 1902). And very good melodrama it is. Ella Raines, Stanley Ridges and Henry Daniell are excellent respectively as Wife No. 2, the calmly cruel sleuth, and a neighbor who blackmails his way to death. Rosalind Ivan is satisfactorily terrifying as the Gorgon-like Wife No. 1. Sloping, suffer ing Charles Laughton has a high old histrionic time and gives the audience one -in one of his best roles since he played a similar mousy murderer in Payment Deferred...
...Fletcher), his new bride (Diana Barrymore), his grim housekeeper (Florence Reed) and his great oppressive house casts only a faint and fitful spell. The long, dusky, atmospheric tunnel through which, as book and movie, Rebecca advanced upon its melodramatic climax is here only a dry uphill path. And the melodrama itself, chained to one set, bilked of half its turns & twists, lacks half its old excitement...