Word: trivial
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...would have been easy for the director to make the love incidents into an over-luscious and trivial idyll, but instead he has managed to give them a distinct epic quality. Similarly, he might have reduced the religious emotion to the common denominator of funeral-parlor music and rapt faces photographed through gauze. Instead, the impressive pictures of St. Peter's and the deep chanting of the choir are allowed to tell their own story without sugar coating. This reviewer has never seen such an authentic setting-forth in a film of the hypnotic power of the Church of Rome...
...made governor if he refrains from convicting his gangster friend for murder. Instead, with icy contempt for his listeners, his career and his gangster friend, he sets out to obtain a conviction. Director George Archainbaud directed State's Attorney with a feeling, rare in the cinema, for the trivial and revealing irrelevance of his characters in speech and action. Good shot: Lawyer Corrigan slipping a wedding ring on the finger of Helen Twelvetrees when he is trying to prove that she is no prostitute...
...contented, conservative nation. Their love of things, their rare ability to love old wines, and high game, and fine linens, and burnished silver, and blended tobacco, and grained woods. Their ability to enjoy and worship the things the Lord has provided in His infinite wisdom which seem small and trivial and unimportant, but which are also great, and necessary and almost terrible in their absence...
Aside from the unconvincing nature of the Herald's information the picture of a metropolitan daily singling out for attack comparatively trivial undergraduate peculation's is a trifle ridiculous. But the charge compares perfectly with the vague sentiment of college men, based on a few proven instances, that responsible positions are frequently abused for personal profit. The accusation obviously cannot be denied, but the proposed cure is singularly superficial...
...college he meets up with an entirely different type of personality, the dissolute son of an aristocratic family, who, despite his foibles, is extremely lovable and truly pathetic. The other chapters are for the most part weak and trivial. The death of Diahilev and the end of the Russian ballet are treated sentimentally; the marriage of Roger's friend, Coronado, amusingly. The rest lacks force. There is a strained attempt at intensity, and a certain superficial sophistication; but little more. The ending with its "Violent new force" about which the publishers talk so glibly leaves...