Word: melodrama
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Novel based on the wire service providing race-track information to poolroom bookmakers, with much whipped-up and unconvincing material on the size of the racket, and much melodrama on the attempts of racketeers to get control of it. The best section, telling how dumb Joe Dugan of Kansas City unwittingly beat up a powerful gangster, who thereafter thought the worst mob yet had come to town, is so funny that the rest of the book seems flatter by contrast...
...best, Brighton Rock, a psychological gangster novel, creates an atmosphere as sinister as The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; at its worst it is melodrama with coincidental cracks through which a cat could be thrown with ease. Laid against a background of Brighton Beach, London's Coney Island, the story has for central character a hollow-chested, downy-cheeked 17-year-old called Pinkie, a gangster ascetic who turns killer as a release from slum-made inhibitions: disgust with sex originating with his father and mother, religious neurosis originating with his early ambition...
...Paramount). Underworld melodrama, based on a story by Norman Krasna, directed by Fritz Lang, scored by Kurt Weill, acted by Sylvia Sidney and George Raft which, setting out to prove that Crime Does Not Pay, proves instead that the brightest names in Hollywood sometimes make its dullest pictures...
...Paris, Gertrude Stein sold her first movie scenario ("Really good - an old-fashioned melodrama"), published her first book written in French (Picasso), finished two acts of a new opera...
Columbia Pictures runs a gamut of its own, from the frankest sort of penny-thriller melodrama to the maturest. best-ordered and funniest comedy in cinema. For Columbia's good standing with the carriage trade, the men chiefly responsible are the team of Director Frank Capra and Writer Robert Riskin (It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, Lost Horizon). Last fiscal year (June 26) unpretentious Columbia cleared a profit of $1,317,771. Of next season's schedule of 40 films, high spot will probably be Director Capra's production of the 1936 Pulitzer Prize...