Word: melodrama
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This is, of course, no romantic, bourgeois melodrama. Love interest is repressed to the lone, lorn, renegade Turkmaiden, who cooks and simpers for our heroes. Humor, in the enlightened sense of the word, is lacking, but good shots of Young Communists having a real side-splitting cachinnation excite a sympathetic titter in the audience. Unless the film has been miserably cut, it is filled with inexcusably bewildering digressions: the Playgoer is still puzzling over the meaning of storm upon storm, hands beating the harem door, the profusion of dead camels,--a species reputedly drought-proof,--and many prayers to Allah...
...World and the Flesh (Paramount) is a melodrama of the Russian revolution, replete with sardonic guffaws by George Bancroft and disdainful cigaret puffings by Alan Mowbray. Bancroft is a Bolshevik sea-captain named Kylenko. Mowbray is a calm patrician. His name is Dmitri and he uses his monocle in such debonair fashion that you are sure he will be executed before the picture ends. There is also a dancing girl (Miriam Hopkins) who is Dmitri's mistress. With her he runs away from the Bolsheviks. When they | reach the seaport of Theodosia, Dmitri thinks that he is safe...
...Alias the Doctor," probably the better of the two, is the vehicle selected for the restricted abilities of Richard Barthelmess. Since the atmosphere is melodrama and the theme is medicine, where else can such icy voiced and tendril fingered experts exist as those of Austria; so Bathelmess becomes Muller, and Richard, Karl. And thus before a background of beer steins, rambling stucco farmhouses, operating rooms and music boxes, Karl Muller develops as the boy who loves the soil but is forced to become a surgeon. Complication after complication is thrown in to keep awake a sleepy audience, but the chief...
...also the inspiration for Dishonored Lady, played by Katharine Cornell on the Manhattan stage) was the source of Letty Lynton. Whatever evil effect the picture may have on the behavior of its patrons will be increased by the fact that it'is a well-constructed, well-written melodrama which avoids the stencils of its type. Nils Asther is a blonde athlete from Stockholm Yet he wears fuzzy sideburns and speaks in such a way as to be the epitome of Latin menace. There is another immoral character m the story. Letty's mother (May Kobson), a misanthropic...
With a lively story and a few well-directed scenes in which Dorothy Jordan blubbers in affecting treble. Roadhouse Murder is passable melodrama. Most obvious of its flaws would have been corrected had Director J. Walter Ruben persuaded Eric Linden to deliver a few of his lines without a pathetic quaver...