Word: melodramas
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Very few have Exley's capacity to write a personal narrative without turning it into a sudsy melodrama or confessional. His self-deprecating humor and disciplined writing style help him retain perspective, and maybe it's easier for him precisely because he's always been an outsider...
...bullshit and concupiscence is unfounded. It's very easy to hype a popular film by calling it a cinematic masterpiece, as Pauline Kael has done so unfortunately with movies like Shampoo and Last Tango in Paris. The disaster film is an urban adventure, like a police or hospital melodrama, but the very magniture of the pseudo-events it chronicles--possible only on screen--give it a dignity beyond its intrinsic merit. When combined with an ingratiating morality, a wealth of invention in the heroism department, and a certain measure of abstract visual beauty, the formula--even if formulae can only...
...requires for the blonde mistress of Falconhurst to invite into her bed the handsome black slave (Ken Norton) her husband purchased to improve the breeding stock down in the quarters. Until this moment we cannot be certain that the movie is going to employ every cliche of antebellum melodrama. The possibility that the perfection of its tastelessness will be marred through oversight or the impulse to provide novelty through omission is an irritant. There is great relief when, at last, our heroine (Susan George) succeeds in bending Norton's innocence to her evil will...
...Nights in A Barroom is an old-fashioned Victorian melodrama played for all its worth and given a double edge of irony by its quaint moralism In the temperance spirit, the show offers beer for only a dime a glass. This is a most unusual dramatic production for Harvard, a piece of American social history as well as a piece of popular literature. You may never be able to see a piece of nineteenth century soap opera like this again, at least until it's produced on Masterpiece Theatre. At the Agassiz tonight, tomorrow and Saturday...
...characters avoids two-dimensional typicality. Clara, particularly, as the martyred Working Woman, displays ludicrous malleability in her metamorphosis from Cinderella to Princess at the caprice of the plot. All the romantic music, charming mountain cafes, melting glances and scenic forest idylls De Sica produces cannot lend authenticity to this melodrama, so that the inevitable denouncement is devoid of pathos...