Word: melodrama
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...last. Setting out to review "The Film in Germany and France 1896-1927" the first of the three programs dealing with Germany tonight includes: 1896 Primitive German films by the pioneer Skladanowsky (Reichsflilmkammer) 1909 Don Juan's Wedding, a comedy with the actor Giampietro (Reichsflilmkammer) 1912 Misunderstood, a melodrama with Germany's most popular actress, Henry Porten (Reichsflilmkammer) 1920 The Golem: one sequence only. Directed by the eminent actor Paul Wegener, who also plays the title role (Ufa) 1919 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, directed by Robert Wieni. Most celebrated of foreign films, it has seldom been shown...
This is an odd beginning for a comedy-and comic True Confession is skillfully played and paced, keyed up to the pitch of the dizziest haywire skit. Yet what makes True Confession funnier than most haywire comedies is that as melodrama it could be just as effective. Neither liar Helen nor Kenneth, the man of principle, is caricatured, so their dilemma seems true and could be terrible; outside the hilarity nightmare is imminent...
...timed to the last held breath, it seemed fated by first-nighters' extraordinary enthusiasm to extraordinary success. Some partisans, reading between its hard-bitten lines a sweeping social preachment, freely prophesied that it would win the Pulitzer Prize. Even those who saw in it only a macabre folk-melodrama applauded the play's outspokenness and sincerity...
...Postman Always Rings Twice James Mallahan Cain wrote a brief, brisk best-seller in which philosophic overtones could be dimly heard above the rattling melodrama of the plot. Last week he published a second novel that is just as melodramatic as his first, a little longer, equally swift reading. It has its quota of close shaves, fights, flights and two-dimensional characters, suggests an old-fashioned pulp magazine thriller brought up to date by a writer who knows Freud as well as all tricks of suspense. Its hero (and narrator) is a world-famous singer who has lost his voice...
Manhattan's sludgy East Side, where fine river bank apartment houses rise self-consciously in the midst of four-story squalor, was the locale of Playwright Sidney Kingsley's melodrama, Dead...