Word: maudlinity
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...momentous questions, of Oedipal relations, of age, of the child's world, of death. We should take a clue from Gide: to be able to read Simenon with interest is to read between the lines, to make a creative extrapolation. By itself, Letter to My Mother is the maudlin nostalgia of an old man; however, with a bit of imagination on the reader's part, the roman policier mentality can be the catalyst to other, more serious reflections...
...love affair are portrayed as a psychedelic journey through the spectrum of the rainbow, from red to violet to the annihilation of white. The Birds offers two talking ducks (Curtis and Daffy) trying to fly south through a polluted world; surprisingly, the effect is neither grotesque nor maudlin. Death and the Single Girl revises a page from Woody Allen. An unemployed office worker decides to end it all. Death, an overworked businessman, makes sexual demands in return for his service ("I come and you go"). Failing at that, he offers her a job as his secretary. "If you couldn...
...there too: the way the mother, for example, sits down on the bed in the hotel room before agreeing to take the room is a gesture peculiar to the European bourgeoisie. Souffle du Coeur is at heart a comedy of sexual manners, but a tender one. It's never maudlin, but it's not the kind of W est-Side-shrink humor you'd expect from a comedy about incest, either. Funny movies can be morally sane, Malle proves...
Harold and Maude. A split-personality film. Half of Harold and Maude--to be specific, Harold--is very funny and wildly macabre; the other half-Maude--is maudlin and soppily sentimental. Harold is a nineteen-year-old morto-phile who gets his mother's attention by faking suicide, and Maude is an octogenarian whose "love of life" is on the level of Rod McKuen and Hallmark greeting cards. --Paul K. Rowe...
Nevertheless, a less light-hearted production of The Mousetrap might well have lapsed into maudlin sentimentality or self-importance. Agatha Christie just can't be taken too seriously, especially since in this specific play, she is poking fun at the conventions of the murder mystery genre, including her own work. At one point, for instance, she has Detective Sergeant Trotter--himself an insane parody of crime-fighting zeal--ask the other characters to reconstruct the crime. "Oh, that old chestnut," Mr. Paravicini sneers...