During the 1950s to 1960s, melodrama becomes the privileged mode of cinematic engagement with the contradictions of the modernisation project in Turkey and in Iran. Both, Yesilcam Films and FilmFarsi, develop a number of stock characters which come to embody contradictions, anxieties, and fantasies related to modernization. Class conflict, the perceived conflict between modernity and tradition, East/West, and other binaries are mapped onto socio-culturally specific gendered characters. The cabaret dancer/ prostitute who turns into a mother, the various iterations of rebellious masculinities which occupy an ambiguous space vis-à-vis the law and morality are only few examples. Unsurprisingly, female sexuality, desire, and women's liberation often become the contested ground against which modernity is measured, and which simultaneously need to be contained. Hence, female representation oscillates between catering to male heterosexual pleasure and disturbing the patriarchal order, between reinforcing traditional masculinities and throwing the male hero into existential crisis. This paper aims to juxtapose certain gendered representations in Yesilcam and FilmFarsi, such as the various types of "fallen women" and underdog masculinities as melodramatic responses to modernization from above. I will argue, that while these characters take on very socio-culturally specific forms, they simultaneously represent moments of cosmopolitan engagement with multiple modernities beyond the nation state and its modernization project. They hereby point to transnational moments in popular cinemas which are usually understood as essentially nationally specific.