Word: maundered
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There are, of course, a few anachronisms. The Jim Crow humor, acceptable to most audiences in 1939, will embarrass the average moviegoer today. And there are flaws of style and structure. The second half of the picture tends to maunder a little, and the whole film is afflicted by Producer David Selznick's rather tacky preference for gnarled trees silhouetted against flaming sunsets. The spectator sometimes gets a peculiar sensation that the picture has not really begun-he's still watching the travelogue...
Taken as a whole, Ray's film has the generosity and the prodigal variety of genius. Nevertheless, to moviegoers accustomed to the visual shorthand of Hollywood's clichés, it will probably seem sometimes to maunder in Oriental obscurities, to go the long way round to nowhere. Ray might well reply that life itself usually takes the same route and reaches the same destination, and this movie is obviously intended to be like life-not like other movies...
...very attractive, with the theme (almost a twelve-tone row) announced softly by the low strings pizzicato to the accompaniment of saucy raps on the snare drum. But in the middle section--a sort of languourous waltz--the sense of direction is lost and the piece begins to maunder. The final movement was transmitted in rather hazy fashion by the unsure playing of the orchestra, but it seemed much the same sort of thing. Mr. Stewart's material seems promising; had he not spread it so thin the Variations might have been stronger. His orchestration, at any rate, showed considerable...
Almost as amoral as zoo exhibits, they struggle feebly against temptation, maunder miserably into a plot to murder the man who stands in their way. They attempt their clumsy bathtub murder, bring off an equally clumsy auto murder, face sure conviction, and are rescued in one of the most reptilian bits of legal chicanery that ever made fiction look almost as strange as truth. They are hounded by blackmailers; they are tortured still more severely by their inability to trust each other; they come at last to a surprise ending which, in the novel, had much the force...
Manhattan gallerygoers were all agog. They read the names Cezanne, Derain, Gaugin, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, all in one announcement. They rushed to the sedate, vermicular-stoned Wildenstein Galleries. There they paid $1 apiece for the benefit of the French Hospital, were permitted last week to maunder through two small rooms hung with 51 modernist French paintings of the first rank. Such a concourse is rare, even among Manhattan opportunities...