Word: maudlinity
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...seen fit to build this "comic fantasy" around two little children, one male, one female, and neither invisible. Robert Mariotti and Lydia Reed, who take the juvenile parts, both fall into the "cute" category, I'm afraid, but both are pretty good actors and never let their scenes become maudlin...
...Brave Don't Cry (Group Three; Mayer-Kingsley) is a fairly maudlin title for a lean, unsparing movie about a Scottish mine disaster. Produced by oldtime Documentary-Maker John Grierson, the picture is based on a real-life disaster in the Knockshinnock Castle Colliery in 1950. It tells of a mine cave-in and the rescue of 118 miners trapped for two days in West No. 4 section between the firedamp and a flooded pit shaft...
...scatterbrained inventor's death. Two flashbacks trace Friese-Greene's first wife's tribulations, which, when she dies, pass on to her successor. Mania Schell and Margaret Johnson are Friese-Greene's wives. By Hollywood standards neither girl is pretty, but both manage to give touching performances without being maudlin. Needless to say, the supporting cast is almost uniformly excellent...
...actually it is the tragic story of an old man demoted from the splendor of his position as a doorman at a plush hotel to the ignominy of washroom attendant duty. The scenes of the man clinging pitifully to his braided doorman's coat, counterpointed only by the maudlin humor of a drunken party, play up the pathos of this demotion very effectively. The title refers to a purposely incongruous ending, one which I thought was the film's weakest moment...
John Steinbeck, now 50, has run a wobbly literary path for nearly a quarter of a century. Signposts along the way read: charming sentimentality (Tortilla Flat), left-wing melodrama (In Dubious Battle), maudlin blather (Of Mice and Men), tender innocence (The Red Pony), honest social indignation (Grapes of Wrath), meretricious sex (The Wayward Bus). His latest novel, East of Eden, comes under none of these labels, although it courts most of them for long stretches...