Word: unctuous
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...onslaught begins under the opening credits. A B-52 bomber nuzzles up to a jet tanker for mid-air refueling while the sound track pours forth an unctuous ballad called Try a Little Tenderness. Cut to Burpelson Air Force Base, where General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) launches the offensive against Russia, then severs communications with SAC. Hayden's playing seems extremely right. His Ripper is impotent, a one-man military complex who means singlehanded to save the world from water fluoridation and other Communist plots "that threaten the purity and essence of our natural fluids." He alone knows...
There is a kind of man who will tell wonderfully funny, dirty stories in a bar and make everybody happy and not a bit ashamed of themselves until the moment comes when he lowers his voice an unctuous octave and reads from a little card on which is printed an inspirational message by, say, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. The curious effect is to make religion seem a dubious, off-color business, and this is just the effect produced by Henry Miller's divagations into theology that punctuate the boisterously bawdy anecdotes in Black Spring...
...Muscovites showed their feeling by packing around the statue of Poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. chanting: "We want Evtushenko." Their hero mounted to an improvised platform and read a poem, You Can Call Me a Communist, but which pointedly declares: "I will remain firm to the end and never become an unctuous bootlicker...
...Maurice, and George Quenzel as the poseur, LeFranc, shout and gesticulate until you can no longer hear M. Genet. Maurice is turned into such a hyperbolized fairy that his pathetic love and desperation become the cheapest banality. His real groping for affection is represented by nine or ten unctuous lunges at his cellmates. As for Quenzel, someone must have told him that the more important a line is, the louder it must be spoken. He takes his part so seriously, it seems, that the lines he considers very important are screamed above the upper limit of human audibility...
...need for dramatic material; Golden's queen of spades is their one theatrical ace in the hole. Only in America has, certainly, its lively moments and amusing details, but it chiefly conveys a sense of stretching already flimsy materials-of building small incidents about Negroes or Jews into unctuous minority rites. Clearly the basic trouble with Only in America is that it should never have been a play. But the thought persists that only on Broadway, with its headlong opportunism, could it ever have become...