Works featuring "melodrama" (112)
Wolf Lowry (1917)
Featured image for The Silent Man

The Silent Man

Surprise: this drops Hart's standard cowboy-changed-by-a-woman formula. Bigger surprise: it's a total mess...

  • 52 words of highfalutin prose on 3 title cards in the first 40 seconds to describe...nothing: Gee, the desert is awfully empty!
  • It gets worse. From the 90-second mark until 3 minutes in, there's never more than 6 seconds between title cards. Since the title cards are onscreen 5-9 seconds, most of time is spent reading, not viewing. The barrage of titles doesn't slow to a more reasonable pace until 5-6 minutes in.
  • But just when the titles let up, the action on screen in this video gets hopelessly muddled: the hero fights the villain, tries to escape, but somehow ends up out cold on the floor. The next time we see him, a fortnight later, he is followed by a man with a rifle who tells him: “You're turned loose, stranger,” - apparently, he's been jailed but we're not told why.
  • The hero's version of later events doesn't seem to agree with what is shown on screen.
  • When the hero next encounters the villain, he gets his revenge by forcing him to...do something that seems pointless and of no benefit.
  • Both the heroine's-little-brother subplot and the parson's-church subplot are never made to feel relevant - and are never shown to be resolved.
  • Worse of all, the resolution of the main conflict, between hero and villain, is the worst kind of script cop-out.
And then there is the biggest unresolved mystery: why is the hero called “Silent” when he is no more silent than anyone else in this silent film?

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Lanka Dahan

Five minutes of a weeping heroine, a mustache-twirling villain, and a monkey-faced voyeur hanging from trees in his underpants: who could ask for anything more?

Featured image for In Turmoil (Im Lebenswirbel)

In Turmoil (Im Lebenswirbel)

In the first minute we learn all we need to know about the nature of the protagonist, when we see that she seems unable to distinguish between a clothes rack and the floor. After that, nothing is to be gained by continuing to view this mishmash of twits endlessly shaking hands and waving to each other. Your hopes that they all immediately succumb to torturous disaster will be unfulfilled. The only casualty will be you, so best to watch this at double speed: cut the torture down to 35 minutes instead of 70.