Word: grade-b
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...hear people talk down at the cafe, you'd think we were being invaded by hostile aliens from a grade-B science fiction movie. A new brood of 13-year cicadas, estimated to be in the millions, has crawled up out of the ground in a big part of the country's midsection. Its members are trying their wings, singing like crazy and mating in a very public way. In a few weeks they will die off and be gone, but for now they are quite the topic of conversation...
...story of Jake Rubin (played with starched-collar sobriety by Peter Riegert) is straight out of a grade-B musical bio. Jake goes to work as a waiter but is soon writing songs for a gruff but good-hearted music publisher (Stubby Kaye). Eventually he is the toast of Broadway, rubbing shoulders with Flo Ziegfeld and wooing a nightclub singer (Ann Jillian) whom he marries and makes a star. "When I first saw the Statue of Liberty," he tells her, "I thought it was the most beautiful sight I'd ever seen. But I hadn't seen...
...Grade-B dialogue makes these stock characters still more one-dimensional. With lines like "I wouldn't swap the sunlit plains for all the tea in China," and "a man without a horse is like a man without legs," the movie virtually kneels down and begs to be taken lightly. Throw in a choppy film-editing job that leaves you wondering if someone removed the cornflake commercials, and little remains save the unexceptional plot...
...very first State of the Union messages to be televised was given by Harry Truman, who was still trying to inform the nation rather than dazzle it. He read in his reedy voice from a thick notebook, stumbling over words, losing his place. As drama it was grade-B Hollywood. As Government, it was a smash...
...grade-B effort from Reagan is still an effective performance. The President introduced one characteristic touch to make statistics come alive: observing that the national debt is approaching $1 trillion, he remarked, raising his arm, that a trillion dollars stacked up in $1,000 bills would make a pile 67 miles high.* At least some opponents in the TV audience were grudgingly impressed. California Leftist Tom Hayden, 40, who opposes the program as inequitable, nonetheless judged Reagan's presentation "one of the most substantial speeches by an American President in my lifetime...