Word: banalities
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Harris, producer) demonstrates that a pair of showmen who feel as much at home in the theatre as they do in bed can confect a magnificently funny show without bothering much about the plot. The plot of You Can't Take It With You is deliberately banal. Two young lovers are nearly parted because of their families, a dramatic situation which has not grown any younger since Pyramus & Thisbe. So theatrically threadbare is this narrative scheme that it takes an ignited dish of red fire to bring down the first act curtain, an off-stage explosion to close...
...incident of a poor girl falling off a dock at the lakeside home of a wealthy banker, and let himself be carried from there. In the course of his journey, he managed to produce an entertaining if uneven story which involves a number of characters who are sometimes just banal types, and some times rather real people...
...snitches on Bill, gets beaten up, is becoming a moody, evasive, introspective child, ill at ease both in his own home and at his grandmother's, when the book ends. Around his story revolve those of his kinspeople: Uncle Al is a shoe-salesman, a zealous defender of banal ideas and a tyrannical foster-father; Brother Bill is a sneak thief who has acquired a great store of misinformation about sex; Mother Lizz is a hard-hitting slattern whose great regret is that she did not become a nun; Aunt Margaret is a well-built hotel cashier whose love...
...brooch and the recognition which has been her aim: that women are worthy to be wartime nurses and that nursing is a profession fit for worthy women. Since an average feature picture costs $300,000 to make, very few Hollywood producers care to experiment. A few departures from banal routine have established Warner Brothers, in their own eyes at least, as bold pathfinders in the realm of entertainment. Last autumn, with The Story of Louis Pasteur, Warner Brothers made the astonishing discovery that straightforward biography, long a well-rewarded branch of literature and the theatre, was equally adaptable...
Illinois went in for barns, with a dazzling red one by Dale Nichols and another by J. William Kennedy. Superbly banal was Paul Trebilcock's slick portrait study of Mrs. Reginald Vanderbilt in red velvet with her sister Thelma, Viscountess Furness. A rare French influence showed in Split Rock Lighthouse by Minnesota's Eleanor DeLaitre, a yellow lighthouse painted with the vivid shallowness of French Modernist Raoul Dufy. Missouri's John de Martelly offered two ably cartooned old crones in Economic Discussion over coffee & doughnuts...