Word: melodrama
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...Hollywood could never make the kind of pictures that Latins enjoy most. Typical of Latin taste is an Argentine film, Petróleo (Oil), now showing in Buenos Aires. A Grade B melodrama according to U. S. standards, it was hailed in Argentina as one of the best Latin films to date. Petróleo's villain is a suave Yankee imperialist (Sebastian Chiola) who turns up in Argentina, tries to do the natives out of their oil wells. Thanks to the keen eyes of an Argentine oilman's daughter (blonde, beautiful Luisita Vehil), Latin virtue triumphs over...
...French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars were Act I of a European melodrama of which the Russian and German Revolutions and the two World Wars are Act II. Act I was so terrifying that people prefer to remember it as something written by Thomas Carlyle or Victor Hugo, something out of War and Peace, The Dynasts or The Charterhouse of Parma...
...main thing is that Philip Merivale, Ina Claire and Harry Sherman are in the rarest form you could imagine. Unfortunately, Anne Burr, the Youth Congress champion, is far over-drawn, partly due to Mr. Behrman and in spots to Miss Burr's melodrama. The end of the last act is an anti-climax to an anti-climax, but when they chop that off, "The Talley Method" should settle in a comfortable theatre and stay for a good while...
...screen, due to constructional troubles, these sure-fire ingredients never quite jell into good melodrama. Scenarist John Balderston's script spends so much valuable time setting the scene and building the characters, it has to whisk through Mr. Jones's horrendous visit to Samburan. A line-up of Hollywood's most finished actors, nicely guided by the delicate directional hand of John Cromwell, holds long points, like patient bird dogs, for the chills. Then in a few hurried strokes, the villains are disposed of and it is time for the clinch...
...canvas is as honest and acceptable a piece of western folklore as the cinema cameras have yet recorded. The topic has been so thoroughly covered from quickies on poverty row to DeMillian extravaganzas, so adroitly burlesqued in recent films like Rangers of Fortune and The Westerner, that otherwise good melodrama may seem to sophisticates slightly corny. But it is ripe, tasty corn...