Word: melodrama
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...believed what he had written, in spite of its damned melodrama. The picnic had been a success--a perfect afternoon and evening, and the sunburn on his face had brought back a partly forgotten feeling of well-being as he had lain on the ground gazing up through the trees. When it had gotten dark, the firelight and the singing had flickered through the woods together. The others had sung unconcernedly, as if there were more picnics coming soon. It wasn't the way Vag had expected them to sing on the last of their Concord evenings together...
...actually just a vehicle for every trick of camera and color, every bluff of gargantuan settings, every cliche of plot and dialogue in DeMille's too familiar repertoire. "Reap the Wild Wind" lacks even the barest spark of originality; it is slow, sticky and indescribably dull. Its possibilities as melodrama are almost completely submerged in an orgy of gross spectacle...
Saboteur (Frank Lloyd; Universal) is one hour and 45 minutes of almost simon-pure melodrama from the hand of the master: bejowled, Buddha-ball Director Alfred Hitchcock (The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Rebecca, etc.), whose guileless countenance and cherubic demeanor mask a talent for scaring hell out of cinema audiences...
Perhaps unconsciously, the travesty of "To Be Or Not To Be" is double-edged, poking fun at Hollywood itself. For, while taking over the externals of the immemorial horse-opera, the director substitutes rough burlesque for melodrama, Keystone cops for Gestapo villains. No expose of the stock movie-formula could be more complete; no ridicule more richly deserved...
...Favorite Blonde (Paramount) is sun-kissed Madeleine Carroll, nut-brown as a honey bear from her recent Bahaman excursion (TIME, March 9). This time she is the favorite of Comic Bob Hope, who blissfully lets her kick him around for ten reels of good slapsticky melodrama which all concerned seem to enjoy...