Word: melodramas
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This is the stuff that makes bad melodrama, and Saura knows it and is indifferent to it- because he cares nothing for his plot. Given the story situation, he could have made the film into a psychological study, a detective story, or a lover's confrontation. But his aim is merely to tease the possibilities of all three, just enough to provide a context for his real interest which is to create a parable of the decay of capitalist consciousness. The hallucinating mind of Antonio comes to represent a political system deprived of coherence, left only to a bombast...
Robert Ludlum is an ex-actor whose first novel, The Scarlatti Inheritance, owes a large debt to histrionic melodrama. Its action encompasses the two World Wars. Its central figure-heir to the immense Scarlatti industrial fortune-is Ulster Scarlatti, a thoroughly bad seed who may be depraved but is certainly not deprived. Active duty as a younger scion in the U.S. Army during World War I infects him with a fondness for fascism. After the war, under the gullible noses of the family's financial advisers, he transfers huge sums of money to Europe. Then, poof! . . . he disappears...
Renoir is fully aware of all the theatrical conventions he employs-in this case, the individualist basis of melodrama. Rather than attack them, he uses them to his purposes, often subverting them comically as in Bondu, in Elena sustaining them tragically because they express the class limitations of his protagonists' behavior. The aristocrats are doomed to act in an aristocratic mode; in La Marseillaise they dance minuets while the rebels consolidate their partial victory; the characters of Regle circle as politely as the figures on the Marquis's music boxes. The masses, for their part, behave en masse...
...other was The Gypsy Moths) about the quiet terrors of small-town family life and a middle-aged man's irrevocable course toward self-destruction. The theme is both difficult and promising, but in each film it is subordinated, not to say submerged, in melodrama...
Occasionally, Oates' examination of female obsession becomes ludicrous not because of melodrama, but because of an exaggeratedly literary preciosity. A simple picture of a girl walking her dog opens one of the stories. But we are quickly told that "she wanted no intimate relationship with the dog and it was strange how perfectly respectable men and women could walk dogs and think nothing of what they were involved in . . ." Then, as an added literary fillip, follows the admission, "Living demanded restraint and a constant tugging back at the leash, you never gave in, never let the dog free...