Word: schmalz
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
With many a TV set, viewers are still subject to double vision. Now both NBC and ABC are trying to add double sound. After a test run in seven cities, Lawrence Welk's Wednesday show (ABC) was broadcast nationwide in stereo, i.e., two different mikes feeding the schmalz into two transmitters. Fans yearning to catch the slightest nuance in each oom-pah-pah could turn on their AM radio as well as the TV set and, by placing them seven to ten feet apart, achieve an approximation of stereo sound. The experiment worked so well that ABC equipped...
...schmalz Violinist George Liberace, inseparable brother of schmalz Pianist Wladzui Valentino Liberace, strolled through the Chicago night, two thugs pulled up alongside in a maroon convertible, hopped out and accosted him. One growled: "Give us everything you have!" George politely declined, was slugged with a pistol, soon roused from a fog to tot up his losses: $50 in cash, a $1,500 onyx and diamond ring, a $25,000 fiddle (the violin was located, along with two prime suspects, at week...
Seldom truly raffish, the show is often just plain dull. There are some attractive Hammerstein lyrics, and the Rodgers score ranges pleasantly from the lilt of A Lopsided Bus to the schmalz of All at Once You Love Her. But the production adds little gloss: the dancing is uninspired, the performing?except for William Johnson as Doc?unimpressive. TV's Judy Tyler is little more than a pretty ingenue, and as the madam, Opera Singer Helen Traubel is wildly though likably miscast...
Seventh Heaven (music and lyrics by Victor Young and Stella Unger; book by Victor Wolfson and Miss Unger; based on the play by Austin Strong) never, with the help of music, achieves the schmalz that the play and movie versions achieved without it. The idyl of a young girl of the Paris slums and a sort of young king of the sewers-who comes home blind, at the end, after World War I-leaves the audience not only dry-eyed but pretty heavy-lidded. It even lacks the appeal of something sweetly out of date. The reason, perhaps, - is that...
Liebman, 52, says he knows that a scene is good when it gives him "a tingle up and down my spine . . . The tingle is created by some element of beauty." But there is a drawback: "I'm very sentimental, and sometimes I get the tingle from schmalz." Occasionally, the tingle is replaced by a cringe. Says Liebman: "I cringe at bad taste, at inept jokes, at sloppiness or any lack of fastidiousness." This season Liebman cringed during rehearsals of his swing production of Pinafore "because it was too bop. We had the contemporary beat but we had lost Gilbert...