Word: melodrama
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...Somerset Maugham-Doubleday, Doran ($2.50). Though Publishers Doubleday, Doran blurb The Narrow Corner as if it were another Of Human Bondage, it is not. Returning to that indeterminate East of which he has often yarned before, Author Maugham spins a tale that in less sardonic hands would be a melodrama. Eye-witness of the story is Dr. Saunders, an Englishman who for some English reason is a pariah to his kind and has become an opium-smoking, suspiciously bachelor dweller among Chinese. An able eye specialist, he has a large practice. On a lucrative visit to a far-away trader...
...peculiar fascination. An atmosphere of fairy story illusion pervades all action and this atmosphere provides a desired relief both from the crudities of reality and the harshness of "realistic" plays. Theirs are adult passions curiously interwoven with a childlike egoism and sublime indifference to realities. Underlying their tenseness and melodrama is a saving realization that after...
...plot perambulates the great problem of Society in the Machine Age. The prison and the factory, could any one mistake that parallel? Yet this is a parody that parodies itself. Nothing is taken seriously but the friendship of Louis and Emile, whose adventures in gently inept romance and business melodrama, respectively, run hilariously together: and since this is no very serious matter, either, we are never required to depart from the tone established with such precision in the early scenes. M. Clair's control of his craft is sure enough to permit him an almost improvisatory lightness in places without...
Criminal At Large (by Edgar Wallace; Guthrie McClintic, producer). In the latest posthumous melodrama of prolific Edgar Wallace to reach this country are: an ancient English family seat where two murders have been committed; an imperious lady (Alexandra Carlisle) who goes about praising her ancestors and trying to hide evidence; her amiable son (Emlyn Williams), her frightened niece (Katherine Wilson); two plug-ugly footmen, one romantic, one comic and one effective police officer. Less vigilant spectators will be in anxious seats until Actor Williams begins to smile late in Act III. The cast of this loosely pasted thriller snoop, scream...
...Good Earth (by Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, Owen & Donald Davis; Theatre Guild, producer). Readers of Mrs. Buck's homely Pulitzer Prizewinning melodrama of Chinese life, now in its 23rd edition, will find the Guild's adaptation, which rang up the curtain on its 15th season, a brief paraphrase of the novel. Wang Lung, the hardy farmer, as greedy for more land as the soil is greedy for sun and rain, does not die at the conclusion as he does in the book. And he has not three sons given him by OLan, the big-boned...