Word: melodrama
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Whether the rubbernecks' grandstand, Director LeRoy's gratitude and even the qualities of the picture itself will cause the LeRoy version of Anthony Adverse to equal the success of the Allen version is exceedingly debatable. As hard-breathing, swashbuckling sword-&-cloak melodrama it is good but not superlative...
...however, highly genial, rapid and unimportant melodrama, laid mostly on a train, dealing with the efforts of Duke Benson (Douglas Fowley), a public enemy with a national rating, to collect a sweepstakes prize. An insouciant G-Man (Brian Donlevy) traps him by publishing an advertisement announcing that someone else has won the prize and is about to sell the ticket. Before the trap is sprung, Benson has been seen shooting a train conductor (also a G-Man) and rousing the jealousy of his girl Jeanie (Isabel Jewell) with his attentions to Anne (Gloria Stuart). The cast is made...
...Phillips Oppenheim-Little, Brown ($2). Last week E. Phillips Oppenheim published his 100th novel. This year rounds out a half-century of writing. Next October he will be 70. "E. Phillips Oppenheim" is more than a man's name: it has become a familiar phrase for bejewelled melodrama. In the 50 years Author Oppenheim has been doing business his trademarked product has become as well known and as popular as a successful breakfast food, and for the same reasons : it is a standard brand and it pleases the public palate. To analyze an Oppenheim book would be as uninformative...
...Moscow hospital, on telling a nurse with whom he is in love how much he hates war profiteers, learns that she is engaged to one. Starting with this situation, which might lead almost anywhere, I Stand Condemned develops, presumably from sheer force of cinematic habit, into semi-conventional spy melodrama. A complicated web of circumstantial evidence makes it look as if the young officer were guilty of treason. The profiteer gives the testimony that clears...
...lays a heavy burden on the firm's scenarists. Little Miss Nobody is evidence to the effect that they are not capable of carrying it without considerable strain. It is a superannuated fable about peewees at the poor farm, a mixture of practical jokery, youthful fixations and hokum melodrama. Caustic little Miss Withers is most successful when, as the black sheep of an orphan asylum, she steals Thanksgiving turkeys from a grocer's truck, chants superbly a ballad called Then Came the Indians...