Word: melodrama
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Nightmare (Universal) is a swift, amusing, amiable melodrama in which murder and Nazi secret agents are no great hazard for sultry Starlet Diana Barrymore. Promoted from pigtails (TIME, Oct. 5), she handles with easy competence a handsome negligee and a whiskey bottle. (She uses the bottle as an anti-Fascist weapon...
...Lowell House Junior Common Room yesterday afternoon members of the clubs sipped tea with the cast of "Angel Street," melodrama now on the Boston boards...
Casablanca (Warner). Before the U.S. seizure of Morocco handed Warner Bros. some of the most dazzling promotion in years, Casablanca was just an exotic location for a topical melodrama. The city was known to European refugees as a desperate whistle stop on the underground railway to Lisbon. This picture is about some refugees who were stranded in Casablanca and some of the people who helped or hindered them. Among them...
...visit to the Plymouth sometime in the next few weeks can be justified on the grounds both of entertainment and of education, for "Angel Street" is a well-nigh perfect example of what a cracker-jack cast can do to rescue mediocre melodrama from becoming ridiculous. The play itself is just another mystery, complete with eerily fading gas-lights, a sex-hungry housemaid, and brooches with secret compartments. If read, it would be more an exercise in credulity than an experience in literature...
...Glass Key (Paramount) is the best melodrama since The Maltese Falcon (TIME, Oct. 20, 1941), also based on a Dashiell Hammett shocker. It also clears up any lingering doubts about the status of 29-year-old Alan Ladd. He is the livest thing to turn up in this sort of scarehead since James Cagney in The Public Enemy...