Word: claptrap
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...current play at the Brattle, Henri Rene Lenormand's "He and She," may strike some people as a tragedy of near epic proportions, but I'm afraid I can't go along with that. To me it seemed a dreary, overwritten, and sententious bit of claptrap. The play follows a company of penniless French actors on a tour of the provinces, and illustrates at length how their sordid existence goes from bad to worse. Playwright Lenormand's worst is pretty bad; for the hero it includes malnutrition, sleeplessness, alcoholism, and frustration--capped by a bad case of laryngitis...
...interpreted by his disciples) is the only true gospel. But somehow the writers who sat down to reslant Czechoslovakia's schoolbooks two years ago completely missed the point. Clucking with alarm last week, the Czechoslovak Central Committee denounced the new editions as a bundle of vicious capitalistic claptrap, riddled with bourgeois misconceptions...
...Technicolored pastiche of symbolism, the supernatural and old romantic claptrap. Filmed picturesquely in Spain by Coproducer-Scripter-Director Albert Lewin, the movie begins by pairing a modem Pandora (Ava Gardner) with the legendary Dutchman himself (James Mason). From there it goes on to bullfighting, reincarnation, suicide, auto-racing, murder, archaeology, an insistent verse by Omar Khayyam and a couple of interacting love triangles...
...Orchids for Miss Blandish (Renown), made in England, purports to be a movie about U.S. gangsters. Adapted from a claptrap novel by Britain's James Hadley Chase (real name: Rene Raymond), who once confessed cribbing from U.S. hard-boiled fiction, the picture outraged London (TIME, May 10, 1948). Censors howled that it was brutal, sadistic, sensual; critics slammed it as "a piece of nauseating muck...
Last week a wave of shock ads ("No one under 16 will be admitted") ushered the claptrap into Manhattan. New York critics brushed the picture off with amused disdain. Whether taken as an inept counterfeit of Hollywood gangster movies or a witless parody, No Orchids is so ludicrous that its thugs' thinly disguised British accents seem minor imperfections...