Word: melodrama
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...Theatre has relapsed to an intelligent and absorbing mystery play for the greater delectation of its average audience, already a trifle put out by the psychological intricacies of George Kelley, and of straight comedy-drama in general. "Three Times the Hour" is described on the programme as a "new" melodrama; it is not perhaps strictly new, but at all events it displays rather takingly a technique which is new to us. Its dramatic action consists of three long scenes, each timed at 10.50 respectively, so that the catastrophe, as our dear old friends the Greeks will call it, expressed...
Even Boston, for which a loyal Mayor claims a reservoir of culture, even to landscapping his name thereto in a fair, bold hand, can support little but farces and melodrama on its stage. As a stronghold of sensationalism, Boston thus shows the pruritan virus still at its worst. Until questions of sex can be fairly dealt with, fairly given a time and place, and fairly forgotten for something slightly more entertaining, Mrs. Grundy will sit in our audiences. Until then every stock company must be Comstocked and critics can always expect an infusion of Bowdlerism and balderdash...
...love. He knows her tendencies so well that, when bits of a dead man's diary disappear from his room and reappear on the front page of a tabloid, he suspects her of stealing them. When murderous kidnappers capture the heroine, the picture blazes into melodrama that does not subside till bevies of police have secured her release. The final shot is typical: Linda Watkins excusing herself from the table at which she is lunching with James Dunn in order to telephone an incredibly elliptical summary of her adventures to a rewrite...
...murder of his father, for which he is later arrested, his affair with Gruschenka which reaches its climax in a debauch at a back-country roadhouse. Before the Manhattan premiere, the U. S. subsidiary of Tobis offered prizes for a 300-word synopsis of The Brothers Karamazov. The melodrama of Karamazov, for a German spectator, is sound and exciting and far more valuable than the apologetic realism of the cinema which might be considered its U. S. counterpart, An American Tragedy. Good shot: Dmitri Karamazov (Fritz Kortner) laughing, when he finds Gruschenka (Anna Sten) at the roadhouse, so loud that...
...latter. It loses a little by necessary abridgments in dialog and by the limitations of the camera when confronted by the peculiar problems of the mise-en-scene, but these are trivial defects. In the large, the cinema achieves the same effect as the play: a neat melodrama given an illusion of depth by the perspectives of its setting...