Word: mawkish
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...turns out, she also deserves only a jot less credit than Quayle for making the production work. A confection that could easily have dissolved into a soup of mawkish sentiment gets souffleed into an amusing and often touching entertainment. Director Edwin Sherin had the good sense to keep the sets minimal...
Kahn's ability to avoid the mawkish trivialities shows in his two recent books. The first, The Boys of Summer, was a story of his love affair with the old Brooklyn Dodgers, the Ebbets Field titans like Snider and Furillo and Robinson, and how they braved the autumn of their retirement. Suffused with the warmth of an adoring child who has recognized the mortality of his idols, the book was an endearing autobiography as well as a finely-tooled bit of nostalgia...
Deep into this long, mawkish film, the script calls for Susan Sarandon to tumble from a rowboat into a stormy sea off Greece. What she plunges into is some of the phoniest-looking surf since a toy ship foundered in the special-effects tank in The Caine Mutiny. It looks all the more phony because we have earlier seen stunning views of the real Aegean. This neatly symbolizes the trouble with The Other Side of Midnight: the backgrounds are convincing, the drama has been churned up at the studio...
...ONLY assume that Erich Segal's goal in life is to be dipped in bronze and mounted somewhere on the Harvard campus. I, for one, would be happy to gratify that wish. Apparently unsatisfied with Love Story, the classic mawkish, lightweight novel, Segal has unloaded a sequel. But for all his insipid sentimentality about Harvard and his nauseatingly self-conscious style, Segal is no fool. Oliver's Story is selling like hotcakes, and Rona Barrett is probably spreading rumors about how much Ryan O'Neal wants for the inevitable film version...
Hemingway and Hollywood have never been a very good match. The moviemakers have tended to play up Papa's most blatant streaks in mawkish romances (A Farewell to Arms), pseudo-profound he-man heroics (For Whom the Bell Tolls) and farragoes of exotic drinks, sports and angst (The Sun Also Rises). The Hemingway adaptation with the most spark left in it today is To Have and Have Not, in which Director Howard Hawks tossed out most of the original novel and wrenched the rest into a racy adventure yarn around Bogart and Bacall...