Word: melodrama
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Hostages (Paramount) should have an irresistible appeal to devotees of dynamite, sudden death and Luise Rainer. The picture, a tortuous melodrama about the Czech underground, brings Cinemactress Rainer back to the screen after a five-year absence. It also notably advances the talents of prognathous William Bendix...
...year's thought has fashioned both a better production and a better-balanced one; in terms of tense and vivid melodrama, indeed, this Othello is as good as Broadway can hope to see. If Robeson last week was a less moving figure than he was at Cambridge, he had tempered the violence that marred his scenes of crazed jealousy, he had better caught the hang of his lordly speeches, the meaning of his crucial scenes. Magnificent in stature, magnificent if a little too solemn in manner, magnificent if a little monotonous of voice, Robeson did not bring...
Sahara (Columbia) is a preposterous melodrama about Humphrey Bogart, nine other heroes and a derelict tank; it is also a triumphant combination of first-rate entertainment, intelligent cinematics, and an unusual amount of honesty about war. It mixes these ingredients in a much-used shaker, according to the old Lost Patrol formula...
This story is told so expertly, detail by detail, that the whole unlikely affair seems believable. More than that-it often approximates hard and honest facts about war and about people. In the routine war melodrama it is always an American prisoner who, faint with thirst, scornfully refuses to yield information while an enemy officer drinks his fill and tosses the surplus into the sand. Here, the situation is reversed. Sahara rings dozens of such changes on old formulas, and in their simple way they make more hard sense pictorially than most documentaries...
...Book. Readers of Retreat from Rostov found Novelist Hughes's mid-Oklahoma notion of Russia and the war a view of uninhibited proportions. The novel was a Russian rodeo of heroes, heroines, Nazi villains, Don Cossacks, foreign correspondents, soldiers, civilians, enough snow to bury an army, enough melodrama to burn out every fuse in Hollywood...