Word: maudlinity
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...ninth and last film to employ the talents of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, and for that distinction a picture worth seeing; but on all other counts it stinks. Stanley Kramer has degenerated from one of Hollywood's more interesting bad moviemakers into one of its most maudlin. The crude but somehow compelling live-TV quality of Judgment at Nuremberg and Ship of Fools, painted with crayon and musicalized by DeVol, blessed with Sidney Poitier, reveals Kramer to be an exceedingly dull thinker and hardly any artist...
...Edlestein has had the good judgment and integrity to treat it absolutely seriously. His film seldom veers toward the melodramatic and never toward easy undercutting of his characters and their hang-ups. He has set himself a hard task, balancing his story on the fine line between the maudlin and the ridiculous. But his equilibrium is good, his eye is true, and Sally's Hounds succeeds as a domestic tragedy of late-adolescent emotional life and sexuality...
...consolation prize, if any, for this maudlin bundle of bathos is Sandy Dennis. She draws laughs from tears. An accident-prone waif who bruises an eye, bangs a toe and burns a finger, she runs to the audience to be comforted. She flutters and stutters, and sentences spill out of her mouth like rag dolls losing their stuffing. By now, though, this little-girl-lost act is beginning to cloy, and Sandy Dennis is in danger of losing her acting momentum in mannerisms...
...presidential assassination sends a shock wave of horror across a nation. Contemporary artists and writers called upon to depict or describe it all too often resort to maudlin bathos or tight-lipped understatement. Years may pass before it can be viewed with anything like objectivity-and then the initial, highly emotional reaction may fascinate the historian as much as the event. On display in Manhattan's Dintenfass Gallery last week was an exuberantly witty and challengingly mordant display of 52 paintings and collages anatomizing an assassination. Its extraordinary impact derived from the fact that the artist, Elias Friedensohn...
...poses, more often than she performs, for a camera that is not there. Colleen Dewhurst puts consistent bristle, greed and spunk into Sara, bul cajolery does not seem to be her brand of brogue. Since quite a bit of O'Neill's dialogue is melodramatic, maudlin or mushy, Arthur Hill does little more than tread gingerly on his lines, as if they were booby-trapped...