Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on laptop.
Melodrama is its own thing. The idea of subtlety and melodrama don’t work together, which makes it an acquired taste. There’s a part of that thinks of the genre as drama for stupid people not able to figure things out for themselves. The whole point of melodrama is that all of the characters wear their identity on the front of the chest like medals.
A film like Written on the Wind is melodrama not in the way I tend to think of melodrama. Say the word to me, and I think Snidely Whiplash roping Nell to the railroad tracks. No, this is soap opera melodrama, the kind where someone suddenly is revealed to have an evil twin or gets kidnapped by drug dealers because they look like someone else. Once you realize that this is the world we’re dealing with, Written on the Wind becomes perfectly understandable.
