Word: schmalz
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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...
Left, by Richard Tauber, romantic tenor who made a few fortunes singing champagne-&-waltz schmalz in Viennese operettas: $9,962.16, no will...
Charles Boyer, who is at once a master of schmalz and a very good actor, gives the picture such tone and unity as it has. Miss Bergman occasionally breaks loose with an eager bit of acting, but it is seldom persuasive. As an international tramp, she is as badly miscast as Boyer would be as an All-America fullback; and she is as tactlessly gowned as she is cast...
Yours Is My Heart (music by Franz Lehar; book and lyrics by Ira Cobb and Karl Farkas; produced by Arthur Spitz) brought famed singer Richard Tauber to Broadway. First produced in 1928, Yours Is My Heart might well have been produced much earlier-its music has a dated schmalz and lushness, its plot a dateless inanity, its humor a primordial ghastliness. Shifting from a tacky Paris to a chop-suey Peiping, its romance of a French opera singer (Stella Andreva) and a Chinese prince gets snarled in dramatic difficulties long before it bogs in dynastic ones. Out of the debris...