Word: banality
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...sleeping partner to the final sleeping pills. It expertly works the old Belasco formula of being realistic in all its details and stagy in all its essentials. Far from being convincing, it is not really specific: the characters are all preshrunk types colliding in pretested situations. But though often banal, the play is seldom boring...
Thus, in 1915, Tin Pan Alley put to banal words & music the peacetime U.S. revulsion against soldiering. The words, if not the tune, still rattled around in the heads of U.S. military leaders. They wondered how soon after the Korean job was finished they would begin to hear the refrain again. For that reason, and because it was unwise to unfold all the facts of an unpleasant situation just before an election-and because no one had any clear-cut plan anyhow-the Administration talked all around the problem last week but never got to the truth. The truth...
...play opens when the six characters appear on the Brattle Hall stage during the rehearsal of a rather banal dramatic effort. The leader of the group, the father, says to the director, "... the author who created us no longer wished, or was no longer able, to put us into a work of art. The author may die--but his creation must live. We want to live," he tells the director and asks him to write their play...
...swallow pill by that usually deft practitioner of slickmagazine fiction, Ben Ames Williams. For 629 pages, it rambles pointlessly on about Owen Glen's childhood in the 'gos, the daily minutiae of a mining town with its labor troubles and civic problems, endless excerpts from its banal little newspaper. Novelist Williams, who has done considerably better in his day (Come Spring) and has almost never descended to boredom, seems almost determined to write a boring story. His success is complete...
...regiments of instruments and singers to gain his fantastically emotional effects, although most of them will grudgingly admit that he contributed some new colors to the palette of orchestration. His fervent admirers, even those who are troubled at the ease with which he passes from the sublime to the banal, claim that Berlioz was one of the giants of the romantic period-a composer who caught the heart beat of Beethoven, and went on to develop his own huge and powerful "narrative" (Symphonie Fantastique) and dramatic (Romeo and Juliet) symphonies...