Word: driveller
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...pediatrician (Dana Andrews) and his wife-receptionist (Lilli Palmer). Stung by the doctor's smug criticism of his art, the tempestuous painter cuts him down to size by trying-almost successfully-to break up his marriage. In the process, the picture tries-and always fails-to palm off drivel as drollery. Sample: a long, witless sequence in which the artist weeps for some lobsters that are boiled alive for the doctor's dinner...
Leaf and Bough (by Joseph Hayes; produced by Charles P. Heidt) was the worst sort of drivel-the pretentious sort. Dredging up everything stark, fleshly and Freudian in the theater from early O'Neill to Tennessee Williams, it became a kind of Carryall Named Desire. Without taste or talent, ear for speech or eye for character, Playwright Hayes showed how a city boy's dissolute family and a country girl's disapproving one worked to prevent their marrying. Seldom has the course of true love run rougher-among souses and trollops, past theft and rape. Love eventually...
...much less a dirty old Catholic mass. Catholic masses are supposed to be sung in monotones by corrupt priests in faraway places. But this is a philosophy; it has a profound message for the initiate and plenty of sex for young and old. As a result of all this drivel, the Missa has been turned in finale furioso of the concert stage and it has been divorced, to as great a degree as possible, from any real point that it has. Its religious message, to use the vile phrase, has been swapped for a fistful of Romantic brotherhood...
...claim to be any expert critic of art, far from it. But I do think . . . that drivel that you print as Art by Matisse stinks. His masterpieces look like the work of a patient in a mental institution...
Said Walter Weir, of Manhattan's Walter Weir, Inc.: "You have only to read some of the incredible drivel being foisted upon the American public ... to realize that today's copywriter-bred on copy research-has become a virtual Katzenjammer Kid ... giving readers and listeners mental and spiritual hotfoots hour after hour, every day in the year." Radio copywriters, said Weir, are among the worst offenders: "Through slavish obeisance to Hooperatings [see RADIO] . . . [radio] has become largely hackneyed and stereotyped...