Word: schmaltz
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...same low-budget feel to "Saturday Night Fever"--the obscure director, in this case a fellow named John Badham who seems bent on dazzling his audiences with bizarre camera angles when the mere sight of Travolta on a dance floor would have been enough; and the same schmaltz-filled discovery of love, in this case--Tony's ultimately Platonic crush on a fellow Brooklynite (Karen Lyyn Gorney) trying to elbow her way onto the promised island of fame and fortune on the other side of the East River. True to the spirit of "Rocky," "Saturday Night Fever" amounts to little...
...parody of the genre called Soap. Public TV found out not long ago that it could gather its most zealous audience ever with the quality soap opera called Upstairs, Downstairs. Many radio stations, meanwhile, have discovered that it is possible to ignore rock and develop sizable audiences with the schmaltz of Barry Manilow or the mellow golden oldies of Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller and the like. In the real world, clubs and restaurants are dimming the lights more than ever, and many such spots have provided the stages for the big continuing renaissance of jazz. As Benny Goodman once said...
...Classics Department. Fleet Foot, portrayed by Alan Middleton, is the typical half-blind, half-dead reservation Indian. The best of all, however, is the wild savage Yellow Feather, Adam Ramirez, who lusts after the white flesh of our Little Mary. By giving Besoyan's characters the right amount of schmaltz, the Sunshine Indians help rebut the John Wayne school of frontier history...
...everyone else in town has scurried into their apartments for the night. No doubt, then, hailing from Kansas means you've whiled your precious life away watching the wheat push and sway up from the clodded earth. The Indian Wants the Bronx is a half-hour exercise in existential schmaltz. West Side Story and The Wizard of Oz are cliches, too, but they exude wit and romance where The Indian only hits you over the head with sociological pretension...
This seems a lot of loot to derive from what is, after all, a hangover of the '50s schmaltz. But Paul's smooth style is always in fashion somewhere, and with the raucous '60s behind him, he is even more successful than in his days as a teen-age idol. A glance at the young Anka hardly explains his durability in show business: could that chubby kid with the wet look who dated pubescent Mousketeer Annette Funicello really have been smart? Paul was the son of a Lebanese restaurateur in Ottawa, but he was only hungry...