Word: melodrama
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...Passenger to Bali (by Ellis St. Joseph) is a symbolical melodrama. It concerns a scoundrelly demagogue, "a dictator in search of a country" (Walter Huston), who gets on a tramp steamer and then can't be got off, since not even the scurviest hellholes of Asia will let him land. He gets the crew rum-soaked and rebellious, but the captain, though driven desperate, is too law-abiding to toss his vicious passenger overboard. Finally, as the ship starts sinking, the captain shoots...
...familiar gramophone record about Spain than a vibrant radio voice. It also did not sound overmuch like what Hemingway had written. In Adapter Glazer's hands, it was less a personal memoir of Spain than a general tale of war. There was more drama in it, but more melodrama. Its sexual passion had been transformed into romantic love, its psychological conflicts swollen into moral crises...
...Weak Link (by Allen Wood: produced by Chester Erskin in association with Philip Adler) is a farce-melodrama as lighthearted as Tiny Tim, and as lame. It concerns a young man who can spot the weak link in every crime. Offering his services to a "Bankers' Protective Association" to help prevent robberies, he finds himself among crooks, is forced to help commit them...
...straight-faced play, Leave Her to Heaven has the effect of melodrama without the excitement, the violence of love without the poignancy. Apparently based on a real murder case, it suffers thereby from having no guiding idea behind it. Whatever it was meant to show, all it proves is that messy lives can make messy plays...
Margin for Error. Clare Boothe's lively anti-Nazi melodrama spiced with satirical wisecracks (TIME...