Word: melodrama
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...transition to tragedy and parlor problems burdens the film with more labored histrionics than an oldtime melodrama. As the second U. S. screen appearance of Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman (Intermezzo) and the first for Warner Baxter in more than a year, it gives neither a chance to show more than their frowns...
...Republican Party"-a likely candidate for the front page a few days earlier-appeared quietly on page 17 of the New York World-Telegram. And word was reputed to have gone down to Publisher Howard's editors to lay off hereafter such features as the identification-tag melodrama...
...will be a shock to film followers who think that roly-poly British Director Alfred Hitchcock (The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes) can do no wrong. His first comedy, Mr. and Mrs. Smith is run-of-the-mill Hollywood farce, suggests that Hitchcock would do well to stick to melodrama...
What makes High Sierra something more than a Grade B melodrama is its sensitive delineation of Gangster Earle's character. Superbly played by Actor Bogart, Earle is a complex human being, a farmer boy who turned mobster, a gunman with a string of murders on his record who still is shocked when newsmen call him "Mad-Dog" Earle. He is kind to the mongrel dog (Zero) that travels with him, befriends a taxi dancer (Ida Lupino) who becomes his moll, goes out of his way to help a crippled girl (Joan Leslie). All Roy Earle wants is freedom...
...almost any hands, such material would yield a rank fruitcake of mere arty melodrama. But Carson McCullers tells her tale with simplicity, insight, and a rare gift of phrase. She makes its tortures seem at least as valid as the dull suburban tragedies from Farrell's or Dreiser's Midwest, commonly called lifelike. Reflections in a Golden Eye is the Southern school at its most Gothic, but also at its best. It is as though William Faulkner saw to the bottom of matters which merely excite him, shed his stylistic faults, and wrote it all out with Tolstoyan...