GENRE

    Melodrama is known by many names (weepie, meller [slang for "melodrama"], soap, soap opera, women's picture, etc.). Melodrama crosses boundaries more than other generes and is more difficult to pin down. In the end, like film noir, it may be more a style than a genre.
    But we're not going to go into that in our class. So let's say that melodrama is a genre characterized usually by heightened emotions, exaggerated style and decor, usually focused on family relationships and particularly addressing women's concerns (the opposite of film noir), producing in the viewer an uninhibited or unrestrained expression of emotion. Theatrically, melodrama has a different meaning, usually focusing on simple oppositions between good and evil with predictable rescue of the good and punishment of the evil.
    In terms of language, melodrama comes from two words: melos and drama, meaning musical drama, from the underscore of music that follows heightened scenes in a melodrama ("melos" gives English the word "melody"). That distinction is often lost in Hollywood where underscore of scenes to heighten the effect is common in all genres; but originally (on stage) this was mainly true of melodrama.
    Besides, in film melodrama the music stands out more than in other genres, tending to be more explicit in its commentative function (dramatic piano motifs, as in IMITATION OF LIFE), the saccharine (sweetened) version of Liszt's Liebestraum everytime the woman thinks of love in ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS, etc. But clearly melodrama covers a wider range of films than other genres. It would be impossible to call HIGH NOON anything but a Western; but Hitchcock's films have been called melodramas, as have Kazan's films, etc.
    Hitchcock's STRANGERS ON A TRAIN was once classified as melodrama and is still referred to as film noir. But clearly neither STRANGERS ON A TRAIN nor ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS is a musical, Western, science fiction, horror, or gangster film. So generic analysis has its critical function, even if sometimes boundaries overlap.) Besides, one can argue that Douglas Sirk created almost a subgenre, the Sirkian melodrama.
    This crosses over into the issue of authorship and decipherment. Clearly the blend of producer Ross Hunter, Universal Studio's stars (Rock Hudson, Jane Wyman, Robert Stack, etc.), director Douglas Sirk, and composer Frank Skinner contributed to making a special kind of melodrama in the 1950s.
    No issues in cinema are cut-and-dried or final; that's why we continue to debate these issues. But there are also consenus about basic issues: nobody would call The Godfather science-fiction or Star Wars a gangster movie (though it has been called a disguised Western.