A truly comparative theory of filmic melodrama needs to consider its derivation, history, and function in various countries. Are we speaking of the same phenomenon when we use the term to refer to films of heightened emotional involvement in highly personalized fictions, but produced in different countries? Theories of filmic melodrama tend either to concentrate on the British and American melodrama or to treat melodrama generally, in universal terms, without referring to a specific national history. Some corrective to this can be offered by considering other national treatments of melodrama, for example, the case of France, which developed the earliest, and perhaps the most distinctive and varied, theatrical tradition of melodrama and subsequently a long and varied history of filmic melodrama.

In relation to this, we need to examine how melodrama rests on its theatrical heritage: This means figuring out both what that theatrical tradition was and how aspects of melodrama expanded to permeate nineteenth-century culture, as evidenced in the romantic novel, the history painting, and nineteenth-century opera and symphonic composition. So if we first consider how melodrama developed, it is not because we believe that a study of origins will alone explain and limit what melodrama has come to be, but rather that the history of the formation of melodrama can in fact suggestively expand how we look at melodrama today.

One can say that melodrama began and grew relatively simultaneously in several European countries, notably France, Britain, Italy, and Germany.