Word: maudlin
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...essay gatherings go, A View of My Own is oddly uneven, since the deft Hardwick prose has occasionally been put to work at drab tasks. There are forgettable reviews of forgotten books, a surprisingly maudlin attempt to explain the death and nine legal lives of Caryl Chessman as an indictment of the U.S. inability to understand its youth. But Hardwick also writes with wit and accuracy about the proud, faded elegance of Boston, a city, she argues, "that is not a small New York, as they say a child is not a small adult, but is, rather, a specially organized...
...heroine of Tennessee Williams' newest play, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Any More, which opened last week at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto. Feeling the approach of death, Cissy, played by Britain's Hermione Baddeley, is hurriedly assembling her coarse, maudlin, bawdy memoirs, and confiding them to a tape recorder. She yearns for a young and therapeutic companion. "There is nothing more stimulating than a lover to every nerve and gland and cell in the body," she says...
...Dietz's translation, which the program asserts is the official Metropolitan opera translation, the brother-sister ensemblebecomes "Happy Days"-no longer the intricate abandonment of social decorum for an evening of fun, but a sentimental lyric saved from being maudlin only by the power of the music. The lyrics of the Champagne Song come out "Then Up with the Wine," and the veryprecise "Meinherr marquis" is translated "Look Me Over Once." Both the alternate Metropolitan Opera translation and the new Sadler's Wells translation by Christopher Hassell are preferable to the Dietz translation, and it is this fault that most...
...they had to shout down the actors were justified. The immorality of Synge's peasants (they admire a murderer and use words like "shift") was only the ostensible cause of the outrage; what fired the wrath of the groundlings was the fact that Synges' peasants are neither squalid nor maudlin, are not, in other words, the stock stage peasants. (Lorca is the only playwright besides Synge who can write peasant comedies without cliche and condescension.) It is a measure of that first audience's total sympathy with Synge's characters, that when the characters are shown to be fools...
...very easy to let social pathos of this kind slip into the maudlin, nor is it difficult to err the other way and harden a story to the point where it no longer engages sympathy at all (for example, The Four Hundred Blows. De Sica chooses the middle way, recording scenes that smack so authentically of life that the viewer often feels as though he were intruding. The actors, who are really non-actors chosen because they had no previous experience, respond to each crisis with simplicity, and without stagy affection. They are what they are: normal, undevious people...