Word: melodrama
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Wrote Detective Storyteller King (The Lesser Antilles Case, Valcour Meets Murder) before the premiere: "Murder in the family circle never pays, whereas murder in a manuscript does. That is to say, every now & then." There being no other comparable melodrama currently playing on Broadway, this may be one of those profitable times for Mr. King...
...temptations to take his tongue out of his cheek and go up higher, Author Stong remains at the top of his heap, lustily cock-a-doodling. At 36 he is president of the Authors Club. His latest novel. Career, pleased his friends, fooled nobody. A specious, shrewdly contrived melodrama of Iowa small-town life, Career rang all the approved changes on the old tune of the unconsidered village wise man, the turkey-gobbler-villain banker, the solid youth who will go far, and the girl with bad blood who has come far enough. It was in orchestrating this hackneyed melody...
...Cities cost an even million dollars. Acknowledging in a formal "bibliography" on the screen its debt to Carlyle and other authorities on the period, it goes far beyond the limitations of the Dickens story. Director Jack Conway, whom Selznick says he chose because Conway is "a master of melodrama, and a big, good-natured, sentimental Irishman," has photographed the storming of the Bastille as if it happened yesterday afternoon. The whole picture constitutes a record of one of history's most melodramatic moments told in an idiom equal to its subject, from a skeleton designed by a novelist...
...papoose basket and though her name looks too good to be true, she is no made-over Choctaw or Czech. She claims descent from Roger Williams and 14 Revolutionary ancestors; her grandfather was a pioneer on the Northwest coast of which she writes. But her violent Marxian melodrama will never be recommended by the Daughters of the American Revolution. (The one Daughter in the book is a throwback, impoverished into sympathy for her Red neighbors.) Marching! Marching! obeys the law of Marxian fiction in having no hero but half-a-dozen protagonists, each symbolizing some aspect of the proletarian struggle...
...Paramount and Fenway this week offer a balanced diet of harrowing melodrama and rich, lush humor, both clearly above the Hollywood average. And that is praise of a sort, for we do not consider the Hollywood average a butt for sneers of contempt...