Word: melodrama
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...those rabbits. Mouth open, one paw up, great big eyes, little impressionists running all over the theatre. Take one home in your pocket. What if that sissy, Bambi, is a bore? What if mother-love, the Cruelty of Man, the Landlord of the Forest, and other miscellaneous nineteenth century melodrama are overdone until they become a lush mush? These are Disney's incorrigible faults, but they are well worth suffering or sleeping through for a glimpse of a lop-cared bunny yelling like hell as he slides...
...turned a routine espionage film into one of the fastest, most exciting pictures of the year. Unlike the "Falcon," "Across the Pacific" will not make movie history. Its plot and script, dashed off on a typewriter far less subtle than Dashiel Hammett's, are standardized portions of spy melodrama. The usual number of dead bodies up tortuous alleys combines with some amazingly handy Johnny-on-the-spot acts to make for a film which in other hands might have been only a better than average second feature...
...Nights in a Barroom" fall hardest where it should have shone brightest. The specialty numbers--especialty those of old-timer Vic Faust, a toothless Al Smith with a hangover--click beautifully. But the attempts of the rest of the cast to pile on the old-fashioned melodrama with a trowel fall pretty flat. They use restraint where hamming is called for; and they don't even give the villain-hissing audience a fighting chance to display its wares. A livelier paced direction, with more emphasis on the exists and entrances that give blood-and-thunder its special quality would have...
Across the Pacific (Warner) is a midsummer melodrama that scarcely gets out of the Atlantic. On a cruise down the east coast of North America (Halifax to the Canal Zone) are Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet. They have such a good time sunning themselves that they neglect to make much of a picture...
Amid the carnage Cinemactors Bogart and Astor manage to mix lighthearted love and heavy-handed melodrama with some funny conversation...