Search Details

Word: melodramas (lookup in dictionary) (lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first (reverse)


Usage:

Comedy. The Dies Committee hearings made a rip-roaring Texas melodrama full of spies, plots, trap doors, enemy agents, hairbreadth escapes, made thunderous by howls of pain from the injured, cries of outrage from the accused-a breathless drama of pure Americanism versus nobody quite knew what, packed with sordid procedures, damnable outrages, cries of "Unhand-me-Martin-Dies!" from radicals, and "Let that poor girl go!" from liberals-and all galloping over the cliff at the end of each installment. The Smith Committee hearings were drawing-room comedy...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: THE CONGRESS: Labor's Safeguardians | 12/25/1939 | See Source »

...Anderson for fit words that his people talk like stilted schoolmasters as well as windy poets : a businessman, for example, refers to gangsters as "banditti." Worst of all, Anderson cannot deal sharply with ideas. The conflict of ideas in Key Largo becomes swamped by emotionalism, ends as a philosophical melodrama where disillusionment is made the villain and idealism the hero...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: The Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Dec. 11, 1939 | 12/11/1939 | See Source »

Fascism v. democracy is their favorite, though only a brand new reader of novels would find anything new on the subject. In the worst of them, Charles Francis Stocking's Out of the Dust (Maestro, Chicago, $2.75), an American in Germany huffs & puffs through an interminable, blowhard melodrama. Frances Parkinson Keyes's The Great Tradition (Messner, $2.50) pictures in drawing room prose the democratic gropings of a German-U. S. aristocrat in Germany and revolutionary Spain. A cut above them is W. Townend's Rescue of Captain Leggatt (Morrow, $2.50), naively melodramatizing the enmity and brotherly reconciliation...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Fifty Man Years | 12/11/1939 | See Source »

Hollywood glorified the era with miles of film, broadcast the U. S. gangster to the world: Scarface, Manhattan Melodrama, On Wings of Song. Pulp magazines dedicated to crime inundated the newsstands. "Stick 'em up," little boys screamed at one another, "or I'll blow your guts...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: CRIME: Hoodlum | 11/20/1939 | See Source »

...Error (by Clare Boothe; produced by Richard Aldrich & Richard Myers) breaks the jinx on anti-Nazi plays (five in a row flopped last season) by breaking the mold. Playwright Boothe makes everything Nazi-totsy by shifting her scene to the U. S., turning her tale into a lively mystery melodrama, and peppering it with wisecracks like those in The Women and Kiss the Boys Goodbye...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: The Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Nov. 13, 1939 | 11/13/1939 | See Source »

| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | Next