Word: mawkish
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Faulkner's story was not one of his best, but it was far from as mawkish as what Foote (who was also responsible for the screenplay of To Kill a Mockingbird) has homespun out of it. The farmer undergoes every conceivable trial and hardship. When the woman dies soon after giving birth, the farmer devotedly raises the child (Johnny Mask) as his own, only to see the law return him eventually to his natural father. But like Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury, the farmer endures. Foote's script and Anthony's leaden direction transform this...
...excellent acting lends the proceedings a strong sense of reality that they hardly deserve. At the fadeout, mourning his lost love, McDowell is brought around to accepting life again by a couple of fellow patients who engage him in a game of Ping Pong. The metaphor is trite, mawkish, ultimately ludicrous-perfectly consonant in other words with the rest of the movie...
...hope all of this isn't mawkish, but the point is simply that institutional negligence (under which I would classify the callous transgressions of promoters like Lang or Melvin Belli) does not make good copy or flashy movies. When thirty-eight miners suffocate in a mineshaft which doesn't even meet the government's lax specifications, that "tragedy" is accorded the treatment the press gives to earthquakes and other natural disasters, but New York filmmakers aren't about to fly down to Kentucky or wherever and compose a film around it. Instead it's the front page one day, then...
...weeks ago, a traumatic P.T.A. meeting ensued. Dr. Hofer, who once staged drug seminars at Dalton, was more or less accused of condoning pot for students. His defenders accused Barr of keeping black and Puerto Rican students out of the school. When Barr wandered in, his mawkish remarks about his uncertain future at the school drew catcalls ("Where'd you leave Checkers?"). One of his defenders received a Nazi salute. The combatants almost reeled back to their chauffeured limousines double-parked outside the school...
...year this Sunday on ABC. The Tony telecasts have been the class of the genre for several reasons. New York stage folk, unlike so many of the music crowd seen last week, are capable of reading cue cards, and they have the sensibility and wit not to be so mawkish in their acceptance speeches. But perhaps the major explanation for the supremacy of the Tony programs is the impresario who puts the evening together, Alexander H. Cohen...