"Yen" is a prestige picture, a big-budget historical melodrama about the Chinese civil war; it was in fact the first movie shown at Radio City Music Hall, where it flopped.

A historical melodrama about a love triangle within a group of bandits.

This intimate historical melodrama, from 1979, captures the anguish of a specific place and time-Algeria in the summer of 1961, the year before its hard-won independence from France.

It might have been a satisfying if not terribly original piece of historical melodrama, but its clumsiness turns it, against its best intentions, into half-baked operatic kitsch.

The film is a historical melodrama about a high government official who wants to marry a woman who is engaged to marry another man.

But what might have made a passable piece of historical melodrama becomes "half-baked operatic kitsch" (A. O. Scott).

Under the constraints of musical theater, Puccini's librettists cut down their French source, a historical melodrama by Victorien Sardou, and cobbled together an elliptical plot that strains plausibility.

What was intended to be a gripping historical melodrama in the same vein as the earlier BBC series, I, Claudius, despite locations and excellent cinemaphotography was not a critical success.

In the early 1880s Sardou began a collaboration with the immensely popular actress Sarah Bernhardt, whom he provided with a series of historical melodramas.

Xydias then turned his attention to saluting the country that had received him so warmly by producing a series of historical melodramas featuring heroes from America's past.