Word: melodramas
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...YORK critic who called La Femme Infidele a "perfect bourgeois drama" had reason to be proud of himself. Claude Chabrol's new film takes for its subject the most hackneyed situation in melodrama, the triangular love relationship. Its subtlely of expression bespeaks the most exquisite taste. The critic's label nevertheless implies that the film's scope is restricted, and while most audiences may find that true. La Femme Infidele is far from the good little movie the label implies. It is perfect not because Chabrol has restricted his aims, but because he has taken his dramatic situations, themes...
...Devil himself. Arriving in London and finding his friends happy is too much for Julius. Playing on vanity, sowing distrust he labors suavely to link Rupert with Hilda's younger sister and Simon with himself. As the plot unravels, the book shifts from comedy to melodrama, to tragedy-a course few writers could control or sustain. Miss Murdoch nearly manages it, because her presence is so forcefully stamped on every event and every line of dialogue. She is moralist, realist and magician, an unsentimental Titania gazing coolly at the "enchanted donkeys"-lovers whom she awakens from Midsummer Night...
...artistic decisions clearly indicates the intentions of a strong-willed artist. The very presentation of the film's material shouts out Visconti's moral and political position on Nazi Germany. If the Damned have ever existed, they were the industrial aristocrats who brought Hitler to power. Visconti's weighty melodrama of almost impersonal passion was the only just way to describe their self-destruction...
...relationship between the plot of this clumsily simple-minded melodrama called . . . tick . . . tick . . . tick . . . and the slick simple-mindedness of In the Heat of the Night is a lot more than coincidental. Director Ralph Nelson (TIME, Feb. 2) is obviously a man whose political conscience is easily stirred, probably by reading the box-office receipts in Variety. Everything about his film is tacky, derivative, finally exploitative-except for a funny and wise performance by Fredric March. As crafty Mayor Jeff Parks, March transforms a dime-store piece like . . . tick . . . tick . . . tick . . . into a one-jewel movement...
...melodrama that followed Che Guevara's death in October 1967, no role was more bizarre than that of a bit player named Antonio Arguedas, 41, a former Bolivian Interior Minister. By his own account, Arguedas smuggled a copy of Guevara's diary out of Bolivia and into Fidel Castro's hands, then fled his country to avoid arrest. He has been involved in a cat-and-mouse struggle with Bolivian authorities ever since...