Word: banality
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...picture is slow, obscure and pretentious. The script and direction, which borrow from Dali, Cocteau and Cecil B. DeMille, compound the vague symbolism of the Offenbach opera, leave the story line frayed and dangling. Whenever they are audible in the upper operatic range, the English lyrics sound banal. And the much-touted spectacle of Tales of Hoffmann's settings and costumes seems overripe and ostentatious enough to pass for a Hollywood producer's dream of paradise...
...climax, in wet woods at night, is a scene for a modern Inferno. After it, the timid anticlimax, in which Natalie recovers her sanity, is close to banal. But 30-year-old Author Jackson, who has already made a name for herself with such psychological chillers as The Lottery and other short stories (TIME, May 23, 1949), proves that she can maintain the same eerie pressure at novel length...
Ironically, Royal Wedding's plot seems no less a banal fiction for patterning itself loosely on the true story of how the famed dance team of Adele & Fred Astaire broke up. The movie's Astaire and his sister-partner (Jane Powell) are musicomedy favorites who dabble in an occasional romance, but shun matrimony on the theory that they owe themselves exclusively to their joint career. When they go to London to do a show, romance pairs Jane with a young peer (Peter Lawford) and Fred with a chorus girl (competently played by Winston Churchill's daughter, Sarah...
Author Baldwin has tackled a compelling theme, but the bestselling writing habits of a lifetime will not down. In a few final, banal pages, Paul becomes a mature man, a whole minister, and gets his girl besides (Alcoholics Anonymous has straightened out his dipso brother). In a foreword, Author Baldwin hopes that at least "one reader" will experience "pleasure in reading Paul's story." On the record (some 10,000,000 sales of her novels in all editions), she can't miss...
...Shiffrin; produced by Eddie Dowling & Anthony B. Farrell) is set in a pawnshop -with all the sad variety of its wares, and all the tangled human history behind them, to draw upon. But Playwright Shiffrin has written a sentimental fantasy in which everything that doesn't seem banal seems borrowed, and in which he displays a kind of genius for crushing the life of words...