Word: banality
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...groupers who lumber about the sea floor after them with the doggy devotion of submarine St. Bernards, begging with śoulful looks for a handout. The color throughout is poetic and covers an amazing range. It is a pity that the commentary is bad Swinburne, and the musical score banal, like woozy echoes of Tchaikovsky in a conch...
...them LPs of the most recondite sort of music: Schoenberg, neoclassic Stravinsky, or Varèse ... A few of the modern parents in Roger's circle actually rear their children on such music. For them, Lustrand thoughtfully provides a present of the Terry the Timpani variety, the most banal he can find, which inevitably becomes the favorite item in the nursery library...
...write off Happy Medium as unoriginal in music, banal in book, and lackluster in lyrics would be a fair appraisal but it would not be much of a guide to the merits of the show, For Happy Medium, though sabotaged by hopeless material, survives on energy and exuberance alone. It survives at least far into the second act when the production does finally give up the ghost; by that time, however, there have been enough fresh performances and touches to overwhelm the playgoer into an affirmative judgment...
...appeal, it becomes clearer with every appearance, is largely to the imagination; the less acting she does the more people can imagine her doing, and wisely she does very little in Sabrina. That little she does skillfully. By contrast, Actor Holden seems almost too true to a banal type to be good. Bogart, however, being as much a symbol as the Hepburn is-and a cunning scene-stealer besides-holds his own with ease, and sometimes even sets little Audrey down, toreador pants and all, as a Vogue model who has risen above her station...
...literate Briton, who shrinks from the bombastic, recoils even more sharply from the banal. Last week Punch blandly listed "for convenient reference . . . some of the telling images included" in a speech by Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttleton...