Word: mawkish
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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What spoils this film is stilted direction and lack of continuity. The incidents appear choppy, and the final one--in an old ladies' home--is almost mawkish in its sentimentality. The picture needs a director like Frank Capra: someone who can be heartwarming and hypersentimental and get away with...
...great flaw in the movie is the music, which is tuneless, mawkish, and worthless. Bing, though a peerless song plugger, is left this time with a carload of goldbricks. He receives adequate and on pitch assistance from his leading lady, Rhonda Fleming, but as we said before, two times nothing is still nothing...
...paternal pride and firsthand conscience. One of the godfathers (Harry Carey Jr.) dies from exhaustion and a slight wound he picked up in the robbery. Another (Pedro Armendariz) breaks a leg and has to shoot himself. That leaves John Wayne and Baby; Mother has been decently buried after a mawkish death scene...
Hollywood, sniffing drama and dollars, decided to get in on the act by filming The Babe Ruth Story. It turned out to be a mawkish tribute that left out everything that was robust about the man. Last week, back in the hospital again at 53, the Babe was deluged with letters wishing him well; newspapers were swamped with calls asking about his condition, ballpark crowds stood in silent prayer for his recovery. This week death came to George Herman Ruth...
...more conveniently unlovable than an honest imitation of life would allow, and they are so tidily removed from the path of true love that the whole business seems as manipulated as a shell game. Because all the bad people are so extraordinarily nasty, the good people look more mawkish than they deserve to. And as is so often the case in sentimental fiction, the teariness goes hand in hand with some excruciating whimsy. (Sample: two housemaids, the Misses Jinks, one tall, one short, are called High...