Word: melodrama
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This play, despite the social axe it has to grind, is pretty much of the famous old black-and-white melodrama. Wall Street is perhaps the real villain, and it is indicted for the murder of all its speculators and their souls. But the old veteran bull, Nicholas Vanalstyne, though he relishes smashing his enemies, wouldn't think of leaving an orphan or a widow dispossessed by him to suffer in penury. His son, heir, and namesake, however, is a rotter pure and simple. He has lived in sin, but he throws the odium of the crime on his innocent...
...Consistent with his theory that the master theme of America is big business, he brings forth in this play a tragicomedy of the stock-ticker. Trenchant satire aimed at those for whom business is "health, religion, friendship, love" is the core, "The Henrletta" is well above the level of melodrama, and hence there will be no burlesquing of maudlin morality, but rather a serious rendition of serious social comment, on the theme that has since been dwelt upon by Lewis, O'Neill, and others...
Locked up in the Tombs, with 45th Street still in his blood, Chalmers wrote Taken from Life. Last month, at Brooklyn's Academy of Music, it had its premiere. When guns refused to go off, bottles refused to pour, and the melodrama became increasingly witless, the audience started to snicker and laugh. The play dragged on so long that its last six scenes had to be cut because the stagehands wanted to go home. At Sing Sing, where going home is more of a problem, the audience was far more patient and sympathetic, hated to have to stop...
...Girl Was Young (Gaumont British). Cinema's top man for melodrama is England's roly-poly, impish-eyed Director Alfred Hitchcock (The 39 Steps, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Secret Agent). Last year, flushed with cinema success and much hearty beef-eating, Director Hitchcock decided to try one of his thrillers against the placid background of the English countryside. Said he: "I want to commit murder amid babbling brooks." The result teams 18-year-old Nova Pilbeam and Play Actor Derrick de Marney in a melodramatic hodge-podge that lacks the vivid outlines and clear characterizations...
...forms & symbols that circumscribe its people, The Dybbuk is important. As cinema it is tedious, technically crude, lacking in coherence. Here and there are pictorial groupings, interesting enough in themselves, but poorly related in the general clutter of hyper-religious abracadabra and the familiar hocus-pocus of third-rate melodrama. The mere mention of Kabala brings on thunder-and-lightning overtones; a departing soul is the signal for banging casements, flickering candles, fluttering curtains. Valiantly pushing its way through is a slender story of a boy (L. Libgold) and a girl (Lili Liliana) promised to each other at birth, driven...