Word: melodrama
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...Shanghai Gesture (Pressburger; United Artists) is a film perversion of Playwright John Colton's flaming melodrama of 16 years ago. Most of its original bawdy plot, language, atmosphere and characterization has been removed. Mother Goddam (Florence Reed in the stage version) is now Mother Gin Sling (Ona Munson), no longer proprietress of a Chinese bawdy house, but of a gambling casino. As such, she is not sinister but gaudy. So is the pretentious picture...
...Paris Calling likely to. A melodrama of espionage and counterespionage, its title is the password of a secret shortwave radio station, over which Miss Bergner sends information by piano for decoding in England. Miss Bergner plays second fiddle to a gadgety plot which seldom gives her a chance. When it does, she is artful and pleasing. But melodrama is no frame for her childlike, tragicomic quality...
...movie is a slow-going, vulgarly conceived, and poorly executed melodrama about love in the tropics, with all the usual background of palm-trees, native uprisings, dishonest fellows, and virile torsos. In the end, of course, Love and Honesty are triumphantly rampant on a field of Caribbean blue. The only good things about the picture are madeleine Carroll and the Glorious Technicolor. An actress as charming and demure as Miss Carroll was certainly meant for better things than "Bahama Passage...
...characters. A fast two-man job with an ice pick in a barbershop creates more horror, carries more conviction than Hollywood's slickest thrill-mongering. But once the D.A. gets the mobsters on the run, the play loses its fascinating documentary flavor, becomes just another melodrama...
...Street (by Patrick Hamilton; produced by Shepard Traube in association with Alexander H. Cohen) gave Broadway its first real shudders in almost two years. Author Hamilton, who raised audiences' hackles with his Rope's End in 1929, can still summon up goosebumps. No crude spook or corpse melodrama, no bloody bundle of closet horrors, Angel Street, which played in London under the title Gaslight, has the good old English knack of brewing a thriller in a teacup, of making a Victorian parlor more menacing than an opium den, of giving to gaitered footsteps a carpet-slippery stealth. This...