Word: mawkish
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...American humor, the intended comedy depends solely upon exaggeration. In this particular mishap, a maudlin youth called Willy Baxter goes through the throes of his first love. While Baxter may be hailed as the first American teen-ager, his traumas are highly contrived and distorted. He behaves in a mawkish manner that is neither amusing nor credible...
Some simple and quietly careful acting and a great deal of perceptive photography combine to make the Copley's latest English import a good movie. An improbable and often mawkish story keeps it far from being a great...
Dean Stockwell is Kim, the Little Friend of All the World. When he is saucy and conniving, he is almost convincing. But when he is serious, as in the mawkish Wheel-of-Life discussions with his Lama, he becomes a male Margaret O'Brien. In addition to his point-scoring activities, Errol Flynn also swings through a few harems as a red-bearded horse trader seeking recreation...
...result is a jumble of the interstellar and the folksy. Characters who are neither living people nor vivid symbols traffic in blown-up emotions and rouged-up words. Besides being high-pitched and mawkish, Burning Bright is frequently dull. Steinbeck might have done far better with a few people talking simple prose in a suburb, might have remembered that writers best achieve the universal through the particular. Blake, who gave him his title (Tyger, tyger, burning bright) could also have given him a good cue: To see the world in a grain of sand...
...clear what he is about and Scenarist Frank Fenton has written much of the lovers' dialogue in a symbolic shorthand that adds to the general confusion of motive. As a result, what began with a provocative situation soon degenerates into some routine chase sequences and ends with a mawkish off-to-prison finale...