Word: melodrama
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...North. The scene in which Marion Davies says "I love you so" is promptly followed by the one in which a Confederate soldier informs Gary Cooper that she is a spy. Then, true to type, he calls her "cheat" and "liar." Even so, Operator 13 remains a sumptuous melodrama, moody, sensational and elegantly trimmed. Good shot: Marion Davies weeping when she learns that the fiance of her Richmond hostess (Jean Parker) has been killed in a surprise attack for which she is responsible...
...therefore, an Irish experiment. Adapted from the London play by R. Gore Brown and J. L. Hardy, with an imported cast including J. M. Kerrigan, once of the Abbey Players, it tries hard to use the Dublin riots of 1920 as authentic background for a semi-serious melodrama...
...obvious fault in The Key as occasional drama is that the incidents which it relates could have occurred just as well in Nicaragua or Cincinnati. Nonetheless, Dublin decorations do not damage a good melodrama. The Key is well constructed and acted with proper enthusiasm. Under Director Michael Curtiz, who took pains to get all the possible wear out of his sets, Edna Best does a commendable job in her first important cinema role. Good shot: a genial Irish bartender advising Captain Kerr to leave by the back door where he knows an ambush is in wait...
...from his spiritual home. Tall, baldish, professorial-looking, with a prognathous but benevolent jaw, he started out to be a schoolteacher, failed as a disciplinarian. Though he looks like a bachelor he is married. Familiar with hackwriting, he served a long apprenticeship turning out Sunday School stories, detectification, melodrama. When he wrote Teeftallow (1926), a story of his Tennessee hill country, critics first began to notice him. Last April U. S. radio-listeners followed suit, when his radio novel, Conflict, began to be broadcast over the Columbia network. Author Stribling is enthusiastic over radio as a literary medium, says...
Double Door (Paramount), one of last year's stage hits, is a macabre melodrama of a woman's greed. Like the famed Wendel family, the Van Bretts owe their fortune in Manhattan real estate to a simple maxim: "Never sell." Head of the gloomy house of Van Brett is Spinster Victoria (Mary Morris), a malevolent despot who rules the others with a rod of gold. When her half-brother (Kent Taylor) marries a hospital nurse (Evelyn Venable), Victoria determines that this "upper servant" shall never touch Van Brett money...