Word: maudlinity
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...that the boss's wife (Helen Vinson) had stopped loving her husband. So long as Hamilton MacFadden, who directed and adapted the picture, follows this simple theme, fair program entertainment results. But after Office Girl (Sally Eilers) has married Boss (Ralph Bellamy) the triangle is rearranged as a maudlin contest between Bellamy and Helen Vinson for custody of their violin-playing prodigy daughter (Karol Kay). The picture as cut for its Hollywood preview included a scene which for its power to embarrass the audience took rank with anything recently produced by the cinema-Miss Eilers pressing to her lips...
...direction is utterly puerlle and lacking in delicacy. There are scenes of Mr. Bancroft bellowing a prayer to heaven in the pouring rain upon the death of his son, there is a long scene of his wife dying in child birth, there are innumerable maudlin, sentimental shots which have no place in any picture and when laid on with the trowel of Mr. Bancroft they become unthinkable...
...strike which ends with his getting cracked on the head by steel police. And when the police follow him into his own house, cornering him like a rat, his sister shoots one of them, is carried off to jail. All this takes place to an accompaniment of futile, maudlin ranting against things-as-they-are. A tract rather than a play, Steel does not interest, move or convince...
...asleep to steal the gold and the hen which spilled forth eggs before the audience's very eyes. He used more wit to get the harp, coaxed the giant into making it play some of Gruenberg's jazz, a love song which made the giant fairly maudlin, a lullaby which did the trick. Down the beanstalk scuttled Jack followed by the giant who, being only rubber and hot air, burst and fell in a deflated mass. The witch by this time was a beautiful princess but the Erskine cow had no more inclination for weddings than Composer Gruenberg...
Miss Brice does her celebrated Jewish interpretation of Peter Pan ("It ish Dink-a-Bell!"). She is again very funny as the slightly Semitic Southern girl in her travesty on Strictly Dishonorable, but not so funny in a maudlin recitation of Dorothy Parker's Telephone Call. Mr. Baker trades gags with his fat friend in a box, sings an ingratiating song called "Under The Clock At The Astor," indicating with his stick "females and he-males and she-males, and girls who bear loneliness well." Attention is called to the best of Crazy Quilt's songs...