Word: melodrama
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People who like their melodrama raw and in big gulps get their fill. Those who would swap a third-rate Hitchcock any night for a first-rate Laughton get an even break...
CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY - W. Somerset Maugham - Doubleday, Doran ($2.50). Melodrama within melodrama, made credible by Maugham's professional slickness, Christmas Holiday describes the shattering Paris holiday of a safe-&-sane young Englishman. Shatterers are a strip-tease pick up, who tells him about her marriage to a man who murdered for sport; a boyhood friend who is grooming himself to head the OGPU of a future Communist England...
...four. Germany has two, as well as three pocket battleships. But when British movie-goers last spring watched a Herbert Wilcox (Nurse Edith Cavell) film called Torpedoed-in which by models and studio shots Royal Oak is sunk by a U-boat (see cuts)-they little realized the melodrama's terrible impending reality...
...with the marriage, her transgression with the foreman. It is a triangle story solved by arithmetic, not geometry. The girl most wants a home, the old man a wife, the young man his freedom. So Playwright Howard, without cynicism, urges his bewildered people to be sensible, and quietly laughs melodrama and heroics off the stage...
...timely assassination (see p. 23) a possible conspiracy nipped in the bud (see p. 21) and the Japanese, as usual, providing comic relief (see p. 25)-if it all had been planned ahead of time to create the utmost mystery, it could hardly have been improved upon. As melodrama, as a spectacle-as comedy as low as slapstick, and as tragedy as elevated as the warfare of the gods-as a week of history to stand beside the week that Cortes first invaded Mexico, as a horror story terrifying enough to blur the strongest mind-in all ways last week...