Word: melodrama
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Because it is virtually impossible to make current history credible on the screen, Joan is more melodrama than tragedy. But Director Robert Stevenson knows how to curl the hair: he moves his camera with breath-holding suspense through the Gestapo shadows of occupied Paris...
Without poaching on melodrama, Director Richard Thorpe manages to add triumphant suspense to his mauled hero's removal from the torture hideout by having him, though blindfolded, scratch the door jamb in departing, count the steps going down to the car, recall the turns, a dip in the pavement, a stop-&-go signal, the sound of a calliope, etc. All these well-noted clues come home to roost when he goes over the ground a second time...
...color and some sharp child psychologizing. She shows a sensitivity to moods that is almost reminiscent of Virginia Woolf. But there is so much mystification, soft-focus symbolism and feminine theatricality that an almost fine novel becomes too dreamlike and sinister for words. Extreme sensitiveness breeds a type of melodrama, even...
...parts of Writer-Director Sturges' fourth picture are better than its whole; it is a confusing mixture of satire, slapstick, drama, melodrama, comedy. Even so, it has many novel, hilarious moments...
...harmless piece of flimsy-whimsy about a poor little rich girl who makes friends with a kindly old tramp, visits him in his hobo jungle, coos over his tame rat, prattles on about Life. Her snobbish parents and his tougher fellow tramps whip up, between them, some lurid melodrama, but nothing that a final curtain can't cure...