Word: melodrama
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...filibustered. No Senator had deliberately delayed the debate. The talk had been good, the argument largely honest and toward the point. There had been a minimum of fustian, of rabble-rousing, only one moment of phony melodrama-when Montana's Senator Burton K. Wheeler had displayed British-made toy lead soldiers, had asked the little Redcoats directly: "What are you doing here? What are you doing here?" (The toy soldiers kept a strict military silence...
Instead it is a flashy grab bag of crime, costume, melodrama, sex, childbearing, social climbing, wisecracking. Whiskey is tossed off by the decanter, money flung away by the bucketful, gangsters invade the marble halls, curtains bang down with gunfire. At the end, the younger members of the family, facing the world of 1941, rebel in "disgust, mistily resolved to serve America rather than swindle...
...eyes of General Wood, chairman of America First, the play was as brutal as a realistic melodrama, without elevation, without adventure, with all the characters, from the leading man on down, dominated by motives of hard self-interest...
Texas demonstrates the fact that, after 29 years in Hollywood, leathery, hair-shy George Marshall (Destry Rides Again) has no superior in the business of making Westerns. It is also a prize exhibit of what can be done with the tried-&-true Western formula when its melodrama and cliches are informed by humor and a straight...
Although everything turns out all right (the spy ring is smashed; Brent and his blonde captive will live a better life together after the war), International Lady is more effective as a warning to Americans to beware of wealthy Long Island fifth columnists than as a creepy spy melodrama. Unintentionally funny shot: Detective Rathbone, disguised as a mustachioed butler, looking like a cross between a caricature of himself and a blond Groucho Marx...