Word: melodramas
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...constantly craning his neck and turning his Roman profile to the light, Kennedy seems a little too arrogant: his sneers make the Titan's earlier compassion for man incomprehensible. With the exception of Liz Tyler, the chorus leader, and Louise Claps, the supporting cast too often tends toward melodrama or sing-song declamation. Tyler is adequate in a role comparable to the straight man in a comedy team; like a kindly next-door neighbor, she foils the cries and anguish of Prometheus and Io. The madness of Claps's Io just touches the edge of hysteria...
...attraction was a real-life melodrama not unlike the scripts that have been shot on location in the desert around Gila Bend. An inquest was being held into the death of the young business manager of English Actress Sarah Miles. The manager, David Whiting, was found dead in Miles' motel room a month ago during the shooting of MGM's western, The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing. Pills and bottles were scattered around his body, and bruises and a bloody cut were found on his head. Miles and her co-star Burt Reynolds had originally declined to testify...
...best. Lamb's temporary political disgrace, for example, had less to do with his wife's indiscretions than with parliamentary machinations, and Lady Caroline had several other heated liaisons subsequent to the one with Byron. In the Bolt version, such niceties must yield to the demands of melodrama...
...drinking. Chaplin wants the drunkenness to be tragic, but he presents it in such a benign manner that it's never even pathetic. Even as a drunk he, like the rest of the cast, speaks in stilted language with a stilted articulation that is too melodramatic even for a melodrama--a far cry from Charlie Chaplin the appealing tramp, whose title frames said things like "I thought you was a chicken." He even tries to make patter jokes in the style of Groucho Marx, but his delivery isn't punchy and the jokes fall flat...
...latest crisis was right out of a grade-B melodrama. A bankrupt railroad was being struck by a union that had seen better days over the fate of 5,700 superfluous brakemen. A bankruptcy court ordered a reduction in the work force last December, and management decided to drop the brakemen through attrition. Even though no workers were to be fired, the union's president, Al Chesser, did not care to see his ranks depleted, and he authorized a strike. Before Chesser's men went back to work some 160,000 commuters had to find alternate ways...