Word: banalities
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Even the most sophisticated music-lover will find nothing banal about the joint concert of the Glee Club and the Radcliffe Choral Society in Sanders Theater tomorrow evening. Mile, Nadia Boulanger has searched deep in the annals of composition to bring out a program of nine rare and beautiful pieces that should stir the soul of the hardest critic...
TIME, Feb. 7: "... Sometimes dull . . . banal. . . . Net result-a choppy extravaganza with many features to suit all tastes and not enough of any of them to suit anybody...
Brothers do three violent routines, sing a song, Pussy Pussy, that has hit possibilities. Zorina and the Metropolitan Opera ballet appear in two elaborate dances, one a banal number, the other (high point of the picture) a superlatively beautiful water nymph dance in which Zorina, in skintight gold tunic, rises from the bottom of a fountain to astound a gentleman in dinner clothes. The Goldwyn girls, trade-mark of every Sam Goldwyn musical, appear only in the jazz v. classics ballet, are sorely missed thereafter...
...Love I'm After" has the virtue of being acted well, but also the fault of occasional banal dialogue. It is too much to expect, of course, that the scenario writers can make each line original as well as humorous; but just the same, you are conscious of the presence of well-wrinkled repartee. It doesn't make Bette Davis look prettier to hear her say: "I'll swallow my pride and go to him"; after the first laugh Leslie Howard seems a bit silly to say, when a knock on the door finds him in the arms...
Like Dos Passos, Author Asch believes the way to go about anatomizing the U. S. is to examine the private histories of the people who are not news. "What I wanted to see was what was so typical that to the natives it was almost banal." He took a bus because it was cheapest, because train travel is stilted and because in an automobile "the only ones you get to talk to are filling station men and traffic cops." In a bus the atmosphere is unaffected, intimate. "Under the murderous vibration . . . you've got to relax . . . everybody sings...