Word: vacuous
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...director, Sturges converted this unpretentious plot into a happy, slightly noisy comedy with a Chaplinesque background of pathos. He ably remodeled Powell from the vacuous crooner of Warner Brothers musicals into a convincing prototype of a drudge with a dream of sudden wealth with which he can buy his mother a convertible settee and his girl a fancy wedding. Pale-faced, canyon-mouthed Ellen Drew, a onetime Hollywood soda clerk, was coached into a realistic likeness of a sugary, $18-a-week stenographer. A good dramatist, Sturges kept his characters credible by the simple but neglected technique of letting them...
...diplomatic gallery German Minister Baron Rüdt von Collenberg-Bödigheim listened with Teutonic impassiveness as other speakers swung into attacks on totalitarianism. Thinner-skinned Italian Minister Count Alberto Marchetti di Muriaglio frowned, grimaced, twitched. Behind them U. S. Ambassador Josephus Daniels, knowing no Spanish, beamed with vacuous amiability. There was not much clarification in the session, although it was Cárdenas' farewell address to his troubled nation. And in farewell he placed his official blessing on General Manuel Avila Camacho as his successor...
...Wall, 77, began to write (entirely from memory) his memoirs. When he died last spring they were still unpublished. This week they were published under the title Neither Pest Nor Puritan. To read them was like reading a Proustian novel written not by Proust, but by one of his vacuous, arrogant characters...
...undynamic quality of the large but precise limbs, there is an unearthy, lustless feeling of the abstract in the painting. The position of the bodies, the obvious difference in type between the women, and the highly successful use of color, lead one to believe that far from being vacuous, the painting is an excellent expression of what can be called "otherworldliness." We are faced with an unreal, but somehow true work...
...Theme of Mozart, and Tchaikovsky's "Capriccio Italien." The inclusion of both the Rossini and the Tchaikovsky makes the program as a whole rather light. We are not acquainted with the Reger composition, but we hope that these variations are above the level of some piano works and a vacuous suite for Violoncello alone by this composer which we have heard recently. Of course, this is an unfair comment, for Reger, according to many critics, has written some excellent works, and this might well be one of them...