Word: melodramatist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...wintery eye. It would have been easy to turn this movie into a black comedy, but Lumet is not having any of that (indeed, he has not generally been at his best in overtly comic pieces). Neither is he a conscious moralist. He is, at heart, a melodramatist, pushing an intricate story along smartly, but never in a rushed or hasty manner. He is one of those blessed directors who first knows what he wants and then quickly recognizes when he's got it. His last movie, Find Me Guilty, a wild take on an endless Mafia trial, was under...
...kicking distance of funny. Real guys don't walk, not in Thalia, Texas. The trouble is that Duane, wambling hero of The Last Picture Show and Texasville, is actually becalmed. He has lost the happy soul's gift of reality avoidance. So too with McMurtry, usually an inspired melodramatist, who plays this one so straight and flat that neither he nor his hero can find any curative trouble for Duane to get into. The poor fellow needs a buffalo stampede or a seductive IRS auditor, but nothing turns...
...haunts the same kind of shabby neighborhoods that Riis did. But what goes on in Weegee's festive, suffering, unsanitary New York is a sight to be enjoyed more than clucked over. The tenements that preoccupied Riis, a moralist and social reformer, are taken for granted by Weegee, a melodramatist, who treats the city as no more than the staging ground for each night's blunt sensations...
Moral Struggles. This scheme is as wild as any ever manufactured by a Victorian theatrical melodramatist and if Chabrol's plot reminds us of antique theatrical forms, so do his characters. They seem to exist mainly to demonstrate how - caught up in our own pre occupations and bemused by the ambiguities and polite deceptions of modern behavior - we miss the moral struggles going on around...
Gothic Tastes. O'Neill the sometime melodramatist could not have improved upon his own beginnings. He was born on a grey, showery day in October 1888 in the Barrett House, a family hotel fittingly located on Broadway. (During his last illness in Boston 65 years later, he was to raise himself from a stupor and cry: "Born in a goddam hotel room and dying in a hotel room!") His father, James O'Neill, a famous romantic actor of the day. was giving something like his 1,400th performance in Monte Cristo, the play which for over a quarter...