Word: vapidness
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Best-sellers have sometimes ridden the crest of a fad, sometimes have been the stone that set the avalanche in motion. Linen dusters fluttered along U.S. highways in 1905, and in their back draft C.N. and A.M. Williamson, specialists in vapid romances of the open road, whose heroines invariably fell for their chauffeurs (all princes in disguise), were swept on to the best-seller list with their The Princess Passes. In 1923 a slim volume with a top-heavy title, Self-Mastery through Conscious Auto-Suggestion, had Americans everywhere murmuring, "Every day in every way, I am getting better...
...finger tips, Cardinal O'Connell was a remote figure to most of the 23 million U.S. Catholics. But they heard him often. He thundered against Hollywood ("the scandal of the nation"), Albert Einstein's theories ("authentic atheism, even if camouflaged as cosmic pantheism"), radio crooners ("whiners crying vapid words"), mercy killings ("suffering is the discipline of humanity"), morals in general ("women are becoming masculine and the men effeminate"). He denounced immoral styles, told his priests they might refuse Holy Communion to women with lipstick...
...wife Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman, whose beautiful performance transfigures a vapid role). Once in Paris she thought she was a widow, and fell in love with Rick. But she left him as soon as she learned that Laszlo was alive. Rick is still trying to get over it. So is lisa...
...those who can take it, The Glass Key is a hard, fast, frightening hour, with a few soft spots. Veronica Lake's special talents give inappropriate energy to a somewhat vapid role. Alan Ladd is really the whole picture. With expert writing, direction and a very solid cast working to dilute him, Ladd makes Beaumont come close to the character that Hammett had in mind-an admirable, minor-league Machiavelli...
...solid burghers, soldiers and surgeons high prices for his solemn, cloudy canvases, married a woman of wealth, spent money like a drunken lord on paintings, prints, armor, tapestries and pearls. Some of the ruff-necked portraits Painter Rembrandt did during this early period were as prim and vapid as their complacent cheese-eating subjects. But on the side he prowled Amsterdam's ancient docksides and ghetto streets, drawing, painting and incessantly limning the gnarled faces and baggy clothes of rabbis, sailors and Portuguese refugees...