Word: maudlin
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...restored to favor-goes back to Dwight Eisenhower. Nixon's was the first such trial by television, which took place 20 years earlier than Nixon's greater trials in Watergate. In 1952 he saved himself from being dropped as Ike's running mate by making his maudlin Checkers speech. Nixon had one decided advantage over Allen. He persuaded the Republican Party to buy half an hour of prime television time, where he could make his pitch uninterrupted by hectoring reporters. For Allen to plead his case before the big audiences he wanted, he had to choose among...
...programmer, Mrs. Prickley has a record at least as distinguished as Fred Silverman's. Among her winners: The Sammy Maudlin Show, a Caballero-in-spired festival of show-biz glitz presided over by a rump-bussing host and a couple of regular guests, Entertainer Lola Heatherton, whose specialty is a piercing rendition of New York, New York, and Funnyman Bobby Bittman, whose jokes are as tarnished as his gold chains; and The Great White North, a public service program in which two dim-bulb brothers, Bob and Doug McKenzie, swill brew, cook back bacon and discuss such issues...
...famous Black entertainers and provided a classic history of Black images in American movies. But Stormy Weather never attempted to present the realities faced by Black entertainers in American show business; rather, it presented a mature Black actor, held dear by white and Black audiences, strolling down a maudlin Hall of Fame for racial stereotypes...
Save for one or two which don't work, however, the performances are extraordinary. Bridges plays the languid stud with perfection. His Golden Boy is the perfect quirkly foil for Cutter's sometimes maudlin, been-to-hell-and-back humor and disrespect. Cutter uses his maiming to control people at times, but he knows he's doing it, and it becomes, like Bones' good looks, just another method of dealing. And they know this. They've read the same psych books we have. To see Cutter coquettishly discussing "duty" to get out of a drunk driving...
...play is conceived as Williams' last concert, in which he performs 22 of his songs while telling his version of an entertainer's life and self-inflicted hard times. As the performance progresses, and Hank periodically darts offstage for a "glass of milk," he becomes more surly, maudlin, fatalistic. His life is crumbling; he knows it and, trouper to the end, makes a slam-bang show out of it. So does Carl Chase, who plays Williams. He does not look like Hank; he does not sound much like him. But through craft or luck or force of will...