Word: melodrama
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Ramshackle Inn (by George Batson; produced by Robert Reud) brought Zasu Pitts, Hollywood's funny, fluttery fool, to Broadway on a sleeveless errand. A sort of shotgun marriage between farce and melodrama, Ramshackle Inn is lousy with murders, lacking in thrills, not very long on laughs. As a befuddled innkeeper who winds up more than a match for the villains, Actress Pitts is amusing enough, but by no means a match for the bad play...
...interest by portraying him in the teeth of war. But it produces only a plausible symbol, not a flesh-&-blood human being. Sam is made too articulate about what ails him and not convincing enough about why he alters. Nor does the play, which distrusts the shock tactics of melodrama, possess the skill to be vivid for long without...
Playwright Osborn has coaxed a good deal of the book's oddity and fun into the theater. But from some of its subterraneous horror he shies off, some of it eludes him, and the rest comes through merely as melodrama...
...Cross of Lorraine (MGM) is a remarkable melodrama about a cruel and magnificent subject-escape from a German military prison for French soldiers...
...having Peter relate them to a psychiatrist who is also a Communist and something of a psychiatric case herself. But they are strong enough even when tempered with psychoanalytic jargon. Arrival and Departure is a far less important book than Koestler's Darkness at Noon, a political melodrama of the Moscow trials. Its novel contribution is in its subtle picture of the Communist use of psychiatry...