Word: mawkish
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...should have something else. Tuneful songs, original sets, and pretty faces are enough to make a good musical. The only thing either colorful or entertaining in this musical is Fred Astaire's dancing. His singing and acting are coarse and mawkish, while his skinny co-star, Vera-Ellen, shows even less talent...
...dialogue ranges from fifth to mawkish sentimentality. Walter Abel, as Captain Mike Dorgan, alternates between swallowing nobly and delivering impassioned speeches into a ship-to-shore phone, which scare the daylights out of his six WAVES. At length, however, his more elevated sentiments blossom forth, and he breaks into a rousing chorus of "For Those in Peril on the Sea." The less said of the rest of the acting the better...
...Carlova for its morning-paper customers, International News Service belatedly realized that it needed a new life story for its afternoon clients. It wired London Correspondent Fred Doerflinger to write a new life story from his own sources-and not to read Carlova. Editorials were reverent without being mawkish. Even McCormick's Anglophobic Chicago Tribune bowed its head: "George VI will be remembered as a man of simple piety, a good man . . . and a model of what a constitutional monarch should...
Actually, the varied fare proved less a virtue than a vice. By Dickens standards, too much of Williams' material was close to mediocre. The brief annals of Paul Dombey exposed Dickens' mawkish side; a little-known ghost story, The Signalman, raised no goose pimples. Surprisingly, the one real nonhumorous success was a dramatic pastiche from A Tale of Two Cities. Even much of the humor was secondbest. Williams did score a bull's-eye with a minor yarn, Mr. Chops. If a showman as gifted as Emlyn Williams ever goes to work on the great comic figures...
Legend of Lovers is a bewilderment of contrasts: between realistic and romantic love, cynicism and idealism, the claims of life, impermanent and impure, and those of changeless Death, to whom Anouilh grants a rather mawkish victory. The play has its merits. Amid so many varieties of love, it at least excludes Hollywood's. There are vivid counterpointings, piquant juxtapositions. Eldon Elder's set is splendidly striking; and though Dorothy McGuire seems partly mystified and partly miscast as the girl, Richard Burton, as her lover, plays a difficult role persuasively. But the play grows tedious with saucy twists...