List of melodrama films explained

This is a chronological list of melodrama films. Although melodrama can be found in film since its beginnings, it was not identified as a particular genre by film scholars—with its own formal and thematic features—until the 1970s and 1980s, at a time when new methodological approaches within film studies were being adopted, which placed greater emphasis on ideology, gender, and psychoanalysis. Much like film noir, melodrama was identified as a particular genre by film historians, and critics and theorists long after the films themselves had been made. However, unlike film noir, the term "melodrama" was widely used in Hollywood prior to its adoption by critics and historians, although with a very different meaning, as it referred to fast-paced action thrillers featuring violence and dangerous stunts. The definition of melodrama as a particular film genre—which emerged within film studies in the early 1970s—was eventually widely accepted by Hollywood filmmakers, reviewers, and journalists.

The academic interest in melodrama arose from a 1970s critical reappraisal of the work of Douglas Sirk, and the term evolved into a "broad category of cinema, one that often deals with highly-charged emotional issues, characterised by an extravagantly dramatic register and frequently by an overtly emotional mode of address." Despite its popularity, the exact definition of melodrama has been the subject of extensive and complex debates, and the term functions as an umbrella term that hybridises several film cycles and sub-genres, including romantic dramas, costume dramas, psychological thrillers, gothic films, domestic dramas, juvenile delinquency films, and crime films, among others. Some scholars have equated melodrama with the category of "woman's films", while others have used the term to refer to specific sub-genres, such as "family melodrama" or "maternal melodrama". As noted by John Mercer and Martin Shingler, the term "can be (and has been) applied to a large and diverse body of film spanning virtually every decade of filmmaking history and to different continents and cultures: American, European (for example, Gainsborough Melodrama) and Eastern (as with Hindi cinema)." To minimize dispute, the films included in this list should preferably be referenced with a reliable, published source by an expert in this field.

1910s