Word: melodramatist
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...play's forbidding tone or gloomy subject matter that makes it, after an impressive first half, so palpably decline. It is, rather, its compulsion to prolong the agony without knowing how to dramatize it. The fine craftsman and melodramatist who wrote Brighton Rock and The Power and the Glory, the novelist who much more deftly approached the theme of The Living Room in The Heart of the Matter, has, in his first play, allowed his anxious emotions to overwhelm him. The Living Room too much batters its theme before the suicide, and again for a whole scene after...
Died. Samuel Shipman, 53, prolific Broadway playwright; of heart disease; in Manhattan. A cynical melodramatist who said he made $1,500,000 in 1918-22 from East Is West, Friendly Enemies, Lawful Larceny and The Woman in Room 13, he frequently dictated his plays to stenographers working in shifts. In a speedwriting contest with the late Edgar Wallace, he completed The Lady Must Be Found in 38½ hr., but lost to Wallace's Ocean Liner...
...concerned with the doings in a lighthouse on Cape Forlorn, New Zealand. Why the God-fearing keeper (William Desmond) married his lecherous wife (Franc Hale) is something Australian Playwright Frank Harvey does not explain. When her husband goes to the mainland, she betrays him with his assistant (old Melodramatist Walker Whiteside). When an absconder turns up with the loot of an investment company to which her husband's savings are entrusted, she promptly switches her affections to him. When the absconder jumps off the lighthouse and kills himself, she steals the money and goes off with a lighthouse inspector...
...personal jingoist news organ Armed Poland flaunted a demand that Poland seize from Germany the territories of Ermeland, Stettin, Oppeln and Breslau, "because the Treaty of Versailles has done Poland an injustice by not granting her the ancient Polish frontier of 1772." Straightway it was rumored that Pilsudski, super-melodramatist, had feigned illness that he might secretly view the terrain of the military seizure demanded by Armed Poland. When finally tracked down by reporters, the Marshal was discovered in superintendence of secret maneuvres by the poison gas corps of the Polish Army...
Saint Joan. A curiously conglomerate compound is this latest Shaw play which the Theatre Guild brought out last week in the most gorgeous of red, gray and gold bindings. Some of the chapters are conceived in all the author's shameless artfulness as a melodramatist. Some of them are born of Shaw's inevitable penchant for controversial conversation. Christianity is alternately belabored and immortalized. History is consistently in caricature. These moods and many more are bundled into three full hours of changing action. Viewed as a whole, the play tantalizes. It is a stimulant and a drug mixed...