Word: mawkish
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...claim that the picture is completely nonpolitical is absurd. It is not only intensely political, but biased and sentimental; e.g., there is no recognition of such failures in international diplomacy as the Yalta conference. The comments of the plain people who remember and tell the Roosevelt story are mawkish examples of common-mannishness. The only dissenting voice is from a malevolent caricature of the club-chair Roosevelt-hater...
...Mawkish in spots, High Barbaree often strays through loose, highly fabricated, though nicely made flashbacks. But in some important respects, the movie remains true to the best that is in its gently romantic spirit. As a result, it is genuinely moving. Van Johnson, who has given some wretched performances in the past as a bobby-soxers' delight, does a convincing job as the softened young executive, troubled by memories and resisting them as best he can. And June Allyson, who seems incapable of a superficial performance, is excellent as the girl who never gives...
...heaviest-Gene Lockhart and Andy Devine acting like boys of eight-the fantasy is both unfunny and mawkish. At its best-a flock of ancient socialites helplessly jiving Wagner's Evening Star-it has a weird, wild, death-dance vitality which shows how tame most deliberate surrealism...
...They nourished what they chose to call nostalgie de la boue - "the longing for the gutter." Paul Verlaine, the outstanding poet of his day, was a diseased, perverted dipsomaniac who "wrapped his suppurating limbs ... in vile rags," lived off the earnings of prostitutes, and alternated between "maudlin ferocity [and] mawkish repentance." Accused of being decadent, he replied: "I love this word decadence, all shimmering in purple and gold. ... It suggests a soul capable of intense pleasures. ... It is redolent of the rouge of courtesans, the games of the circus, the panting of the gladiator ... the consuming in flames of races...
Happy Land is a hard story to picturize without being mawkish. The film does not always succeed. But there is a great deal of simple saving grace about it. The son, who is bad as a baby and unsure as a boy, is as remarkably good as an adolescent (James West) as Don Ameche is as the father. Henry Morgan deserves a small Oscar as the boy's friend...