Word: melodrama
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...Press with an "American Tragedy Murder." Paramount filmed the story in 1931, subsequently defending itself against one suit brought by Mr. Dreiser because the company had "vivisected" his work, another brought by Grace Brown's mother, who claimed she had been libeled. A U.S. playwright made a melodrama out of the story. A pair of French playwrights made it a character study. A Russian playwright made it a text for Bolshevism. But no adapters have departed so radically from the novel or achieved so exciting a result as the German authors of Case of Clyde Griffiths...
...Riffraff," Jean Harlow and Spencer Tracy in the title role, is an expert melodrama of bombs, brains, brute stupidity, strike agitation, and escape from prison. The director makes use of every stock situation known to cinema, from the working girl sweetheart and the caveman boyfriend with neolithic brawn and paleolithic brains, to the sirens and flying bullets that scream after the escaped prisoner. But from beginning to end there is not one single cliche. In addition to this remarkable achievement, the picture tells a passionate love story without one word of love. Spencer Tracy, the tough...
...novelty to recommend it beyond the presence in the cast of Harry Richman, whose Times Square baritone and face of a dissolute mastiff have not been on display for cinemaddicts since Putting on the Ritz in 1930. He is a song & dance man who salvages a troupe of cheap melodrama actors from a Mississippi River showboat, puts them in his Broadway production, gets remorse when the audience laughs at the heroine (Rochelle Hudson...
Same year New York's President of Police Commissioners Theodore Roosevelt took a leaf from current melodrama, declared: "There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American . . . bent only on amassing a fortune, and putting his fortune only to the basest uses-whether these uses be to speculate in stocks and wreck railroads himself, or to allow his son to lead a life of foolish and expensive idleness and gross debauchery, or to purchase some scoundrel of high social position, foreign or native, for his daughter...
...character to add to Dr. Mudd's torments at Fort Jefferson: a lean & mean chief warden (John Carradine). A sharp-tongued, suspicious prison doctor was well played by 0. P. Heggie, who died two weeks after his role was finished. The picture is a splendid example of biographical melodrama which should appall its audiences, enrich its producers and remind Hollywood that U. S. history, no less than that of France, Mexico and Britain, contains rich veins of screen material which deserve to be mined by able writers. The Milky Way (Paramount). No. 2 comedian of silent pictures, almost...