Pauline Kael never forgave Clint Eastwood for that statement or for making Dirty Harr y, and she was on hand to set her hooks into the inevitable sequel that followed in 1973, Magnum Force . Of that film she wrote Clint Eastwood isn't offensive. He isn't an actor, so one could hardly call him a bad actor.... And acting isn't required of him in Magnum Force , which takes its name from the giant's phallus. ... A tall, cold cod like Eastwood removes the last pretensions to human feeling from the action melodrama, making it an impersonal, almost abstract exercise in brutalization.
Quotes about melodrama (16 Quotes)
Contrary to the unsophisticated suggestions of melodrama, to rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as of the firm seat
Every week we had a different story and setting. Some were costume and period some were modern. Some were comedy some were tragedy. Some were melodrama. They were all different.
The constraints of melodrama can be a great blessing, because they demand that all the characters involved - as absurd and extreme as they may initially seem - must stay utterly rooted in their own reality, or the whole project collapses.
I'm obsessive about the kind of melodrama of getting through the days and trying to make them good and funny and a happy experience. But my feeling towards the fans is that they delivered me from darkness.
So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less.
One can play comedy, two are required for melodrama, but a tragedy demands three.
At first, because I had only known it from the Broadway show, I didn't care for it much. But when I read it, I saw a totally different show. There's definitely humor in it. Sondheim envisioned it as a small, dark claustrophobic story. But the producer said he was going to produce it his way, which was a huge musical with 40 people in cast. But the story doesn't lend itself to big dance numbers. It's a very focused Victorian melodrama. That's what I'm shooting for.
I thought that jealousy was an idea. It isnt. Its a pain. But I didnt feel as they do in a Broadway melodrama. I didnt want to kill anybody. I just wanted to die.
If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.
I think that's what distinguishes Schmidt, really. In the movies now, so much of what is appealing to an audience is the dramatic or has to do with science fiction, and Schmidt is simply human. There's no melodrama; there's no device, It's just about a human being.
If I was telling that story in a '50s style, it would have been a melodrama, ... a story of 'An innocent girl falls into the seedy, sordid world of bondage and then sees the light and is born again.' If I were telling it now in an urban, sophisticated way, you would have a story about a girl who is a free spirit, who does these lighthearted bondage photos, then she crashes and she turns to religion which would be the tragedy in the modern view, because it's so polarized now that people see any religion as representing the horrible forces of puritanism. I was trying to comment on the sad confusion surrounding sex at that time, present it in a complex way, and give her religion a fair hearing too.
If a man went simply by what he saw, he might be tempted to affirm that the essence of democracy is melodrama.
It's an attempt to do speaking opera. What I'm doing can work against the melodrama and the music, and parody the melodrama. In the love scenes, the men are picked up by the women the men are swept off their feet so I can get a lot of comedy from it. It's a comedy of opposition.
It will be a very peculiar closing ceremony, full of art, melodrama and circus acrobats. The aim is to have a big party that everyone will enjoy.
Love in France is a comedy in England a tragedy in Italy an opera seria and in Germany a melodrama.