Word: melodramas
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...fact is that while The Tutor has pretensions to both comedy and tragedy, most of the time it flutters droopily at the level of stale melodrama. If there's little genuine humor here, there's even less heartfelt agony. Even the climactic pre-castration scene, replete with lines like "Is it so reprehensible to be human?" and "I pluck out the eye that offends me" is so overdone it falls completely flat. Ralph Martin, as Hasty, the tutor, doesn't help matters any by giving a generally lackluster performance that makes his sudden access of emotion in this sequence seem...
Bowie Kuhn, the Commissioner of Baseball, must have been a happy man last week. For the first time in four years, the World Series was not a stage for Kuhn's No. 1 nemesis, A's Owner Charlie Finley, and Oakland's annual post-season melodrama of clubhouse brawls and management-player disputes. Instead, baseball's show of shows was a tight, tense struggle between the Boston Red Sox and Cincinnati Reds. It even featured an old-fashioned flap over an umpire's call and an indeterminably aged Cuban pitcher with a penchant for cigars...
...celebrated flair for the epic. Religious confrontations, border wars, political sacrifices are illuminated like scenes in a pageant. The very sounds and odors of a vanished world are resurrected-often at the price of subtlety and perspective. For the birth of a nation is not the stuff of mere melodrama; the historical and human scale is too profound...
This is the sort of private-eye period piece that means to do honor to the traditions of Raymond Chandler and the hard-boiled melodrama. But through its own dim eagerness it ends up making a mockery of them. How can anyone take such an enterprise seriously, after all, when the detective runs around in a trench coat six inches too short and 25 years...
Brave Struggle. All the familiar material of rehabilitation melodrama is here: doubtful doctors and blind determination; parents trying to be brave, a fiancé who has pledged true love wilting away from the full force of the tragedy, other patients being both cynical and supportive as Jill masters her wheelchair. Her struggle is abetted by another skier, a cordial eccentric called "Mad Dog" Dick Buek (Beau Bridges) who wants to marry her. She greets his initial proposal with one of those speeches about pity that seem to be required by films like this the way a western needs a Shootout...