Word: melodrama
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Tension. Though he can boast such entertainment highs as his modern-dress Julius Caesar, the tense The Rival Dummy with Paul Lukas, and the pyrotechnic pageantry of Battleship Bismarck, Miner feels that "the best type of play for us is the psychological melodrama-it always gets the best response and the highest rating...
...first 13 days of its second run in Manhattan's federal court, the perjury trial of Alger Hiss had progressed with a singular absence of melodrama. Whittaker Chambers spent seven days as a witness, much of the time under crossexamination, stepped down with both his testimony and his Buddha-like calm intact. His shocking tale was corroborated as before by his wife and a long list of Government witnesses. Voices were seldom raised; time and repetition had lent a curious matter-of-factness to an incredible affair...
...Closing Door (by Alexander Knox; produced by Cheryl Crawford) is melodrama that raids psychopathology for its thrills. What its door is closing on, with what threatens to be a deafening bang, is the sanity of the hero. Sullen, suspicious, harrowed by dark memories, Vail Trahern (Alexander Knox) can still, after a quieting talk with his wife (Doris Nolan), agree to go to a sanitarium for treatment. Then, thrown off balance again, he runs off, has somebody else turn up at the sanitarium in his name, and steals back home to precipitate a ghastly mess...
Seldom has a melodrama flashed so many tricks of the trade-pianos, radios, telephones, striking clocks, blinking lights, swinging doors, even false statements in the program. Yet The Closing Door is much more seriously written than the usual thriller and is full of clinical detail and therapeutic advice, some of it Freud and some of it scrambled. If this adds to the weight of the play, it only proves, in terms of good melodrama, a dead weight. Toward the end, however, as the adolescent events that poisoned Vail's life emerge simultaneously with the frightful method he took...
White Heat. James Cagney returns to crime in a violent gangster melodrama with psychiatric trimmings (TIME, Sept...