Word: schmalz
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Lena Horne is probably the only person capable of singing "Stormy Weather" in a movie scene, while a large, crystalline tear courses down her right cheek--and get away with it. She manages to make the schmalz inherent in the scene seem plausible. That the script calls upon her to perform such a feat, and that she does it, present a good summary of quality of both script and performers...
Flash of a Knife. In 1943 when he began designing the first postwar Studebaker, Loewy decided that current cars were too bulky, too laden with chromium "spinach and schmalz," and had too many blind spots for the driver. What he wanted was slimness, grace and better visibility. To his staff he mapped the grand strategy: "Weight is the enemy . . . Whatever saves weight saves cost. The car must look fast, whether in motion or stationary. I want it to look as if it were leaping forward; I want 'built-in' motion ... If it looks 'stopped...
...fast jive of Too Darn Hot, from the musical brio of We Open in Venice to the verbal lift of Always True to You (In My Fashion). And again & again melody and mockery go hand in hand-nowhere better than in Wunderbar, a charming bit of schmalz-and a devilish parody...
Saroyan is an entertainer of a kind overrated by some people and underrated by others-a very gifted schmalz-artist. In the schmalz-artist strength and weakness are inextricably combined-the deeply, primordially valid, and the falseness of the middle-aged little boy who dives back into the womb for pennies...
...schmalz-artist requires more belief, more wishful thinking on the part of his audience, than better artists would dare require. Reality is as much his deadly enemy as it is the superior artist's most difficult love affair. At his best, Saroyan is a wonderfully sweet-natured, witty and beguiling kind of Christian anarchist, and so apt a lyrical magician that the magic designed for one medium still works in another. At his worst, he is one of the world's ranking contenders for brassy, self-pitying, arty mawkishness, for idealism with an eye to the main chance...