Word: cliches
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...next half-hour he sang his own ditties. Most of his songs gnawed and worried at a popular cliché until it was as grotesque as a Charles Addams cartoon. I Wanna Go Back to Dixie touted the sordid side of the Old South; a Love Song listed the discouraging aspects of senility. For the late show, the Lehrer lyrics got more gory and clinical, with a few interpretive asides by the entertainer (e.g., "The reason most folk songs are so atrocious is that they were written by the people"). When he finished, the audience happily howled for more...
...documentary film unit, later an infantry photographer, as he shoots his way across France and into Germany, his shutter open to combat and corpses, his arms briefly closed around the Red Cross girl of his dreams. The result of all this picture-taking is a series of dramatically unrelated clichés which add up to a minor war document disguised as a novel. What Leicester Hemingway chiefly demonstrates is the importance of being Ernest...
...with new stars time and time again: heavily accented" femmes fatales like Pola Negri, sturdy peasants like Anna Sten, indestructible waifs like Luise Rainer or Elisabeth Bergner, calendar girls like Marilyn Monroe, dignified stars from London's West End like Deborah Kerr. Audrey Hepburn fits none of the clichés and none of the clichés fit her. Even hard-boiled Hollywood personages who have seen new dames come & go are hard put to find words to describe Audrey. Tough Guy Humphrey Bogart calls her "elfin" and "birdlike." Director John Huston frankly moons: "Those thin gams, those...
...strange job for a man who has often blasted television's tiresome clichés. The new show had them all: a panel of experts, guest contestants, talent acts, a big cash prize ($1,000), dancing cigarette packages (Old Golds) and a studio crowd slavishly applauding everything in sight, including the commercials. In repartee with the amateur panelists (a device Groucho Marx has used with immense success) Allen's gift for ad lib is supposed to shine forth. Shine it did on the first show, but all too briefly in the half-hour clutter of people and performance...
...evening largely lacks lure, it is perhaps because Rodgers & Hammerstein have gone at show business with no pungency or point of view-as fainthearted satirists, routine sentimentalists. Where they might illuminate, they merely echo; and their show cannot be excused its multitude of clichés because a few are kidded. Me and Juliet is neither magical about its subject, nor the McCoy...