Word: cliches
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Sixth Happiness [Dec. 22] was more jejune than usual. The sophomore-with-typewriter who pecked out this tirade quite evidently cannot distinguish between sentiment and sentimentality. The movie has more "treacle [than] the Great Boston Molasses Flood." Why not park your lad next to his cliché factory and pray for a small explosion...
...been spoken or even ranted well, a bad play might have proved a pleasant romp. But despite the dress-up and the makeup, there is virtually no make-believe. On an all-purpose set where anything could happen, almost nothing does. Even Shakespeare comes to resemble a string of clichés; even the madness of the Booths is doused by the madness of the enterprise...
...touching or sharp. But the man in the dog suit is the same man who has wooed conformity to win security, who has shaken with fright and then shaken himself free, in a dozen earlier tales. Every in-law who is not a mere caricature is a safe cliché; every point is made twice; realistic satire keeps dwindling into formula or crashing into farce. And in his way of finally rebelling against the bank, the hero is really succumbing to popular theater. What the authors should have remembered to chant each time they settled down to work...
...pioneers in U.S. abstraction, John Ferren, says the movement began as an instinctive agreement on a set of negatives. The painters turned against regional painting ("The Iowa farms painted by Grant Wood seemed to us like dream fantasy images'"), against the rigid structure of cubism, the cliché-ridden images of surrealism-and against the Government-commissioned mural painting of WPA. Above all they were revolting against the awesome dominance of Paris painting and the long shadow of Pablo Picasso. They were searching for something new, not as a school, but as individuals following nearby paths in the same...
...with the performances of Soprano Phyllis Curtin's surgingly passionate Cathy and Mezzo-Soprano Regina Sarfaty's portrayal of Nelly, the maid. The 36-ft.-wide stage often seemed too small to contain the action, and in his effort to achieve "immediacy," Floyd produced a libretto so cliché-ridden that it dissipated the briny sense of evil that hung over Novelist Brontë's book. But the sweeping, intricate score pulsed with moments of moving lyricism: Edgar's proposal to Cathy ("Make me whole again"), Cathy's "dream" aria in which she confesses...