Word: melodramas
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Sunlight Dialogues, by contrast, is an enormous trick circus trunk out of which the author keeps taking new literary treasures as if they were so many fake bananas. A philosophical disquisition upon religion and justice? Yes. A compassionate portrait of America in the uneasy '60s? Yes. A Faulknerian melodrama complete with intricate violence, small-town dynastic decay and a cast of dozens? Yes, indeed...
Then, fingers poised over the keys, came a cry: "My God, I can't play the piano any more." That remark was pure melodrama. After listening to Bernstein's brief run-through, the students tried again, and now they brought the piece to life. Satisfied, the visiting professor dropped back to his seat on the floor, extracted a cigarette from a leather case, and listened to a student wind quintet attack Irving Fine's Partita. Halfway through the first movement, Bernstein leaped to his feet again. "Tune up!" he cried. "My God, tune up!" While the musicians...
...performance of such stature that the rest of the movie looks scrawny beside it. In Fail Safe and The Deadly Affair, Lumet showed a strong and substantial flair for melodrama, but nearly everything seems to go wrong for him in Child's Play, from Michael Small's sonorous and silly score to the untidy accumulation of anticlimaxes left about by the scenarist...
Roughly to this point Rage is a tight, tense suspense melodrama, rigorously and shrewdly staged by Scott, here directing his first feature film. Scott shows a sharp instinct for depicting edgy, nagging uncertainty and isolating a look or a gesture that takes on indefinably ominous implications, as when two doctors quickly clutch each other's forearms in a cabalistic grip. He also plays Dan Logan, with a kind of distance that seems to be restraint at first but comes to look very much like indifference. His performance, like the movie, becomes with each new scene grimmer, more muddled...
THURSDAY: Robert Without a Cause, James Dean created an unforgettable image for a whole generation in this 1955 teenage melodrama. Cast includes Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo and Dennis Hopper, CH, 56, 8 p.m. Color, 2 hrs, The African Queen, Bogart and Hepburn in the 1951 lady and the tramp classic. Directed by John Huston and scripted by James Agee. A joy to watch. CH. 7, 9 p.m. Color...