Word: mawkish
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...laboratory, Playwright Thornton Wilder's crazy, mixed-up parable of the human race is a tale told largely in TV's own terms. Its soap-opera domestic situation, its firm reliance on interpolated newsreels, its constant comic interruptions and its narrow escapes from the maudlin and the mawkish by a hasty retreat into the reality of backstage confusion are all old television tricks. On TV itself last week, they served smoothly to give Wilder's persuasive talk a tart, tongue-in-cheek sense of proportion...
...superb dancing, inventive musical numbers, witty spoofery of TV's overstuffed brass and mawkish product-hawking of such goodies as H 2 O Cola, as well as its spirited jabs and gibes at Madison Square Garden's crooks and pug-ugly environs, Fair Weather rates as one of the top contenders for the year's lightweight title...
...much too softhearted (and not really intelligent enough) to possess the large hatreds of a Swift or the noisy spites of a Sean O'Casey. If his plays date, it is not because the humor has gone bad, but because the plots are usually as sappy and mawkish as the worst of Dickens...
With Hoagy Carmichael at the piano, Miss Bacall at the bar and Bogart at his favorite attitude of tight-lipped heroism, To Have And Have Not is at a near-peak of movie making. Its sometimes loose construction and frequent mawkish patriotism make it the more enjoyable as tiny imperfections in beloved people and objects only add to their charm. Hemingway's mediocre novel has been screened several times, but this is the best. ROBERT J. SCHOENBURG
...incredible that a show--and an amateur one to boot--could maintain so high a level of music and lyrics as I saw last night. And yet Eiffel Trifle goes from one high point to the next with the most minor of sags. Only an occasional bit of mawkish and misfitting dialogue mars a generally amusing book and completely wonderful words and music...