"The Other Side of the Mountain," a lightly fictionalized and highly sentimental account of her accident, triumphant rehabilitation and discovery of a new life as a teacher, starred Marilyn Hassett in the lead role and Beau Bridges as her handsome, daredevil fiancé, who is killed in a plane crash.
Far from the biting satire that was "Gosford Park," "Downton" quickly settled into a mildly liberal and highly sentimental period drama.
Teetering between psychological comedy and Victorian melodrama, it features one plot-wrenching revelation that ends the first act in a thunderclap, followed by a long second act of highly sentimental explanations.
It rests as much on the text as on the music -- Tennyson's poem is more dusted with Strauss's music than leavened by it -- and the decline of the genre can be ascribed to changing literary tastes and the resistance of a modern audience to listening to highly sentimental verse for more than an hour and a quarter.
It comes as a surprise to learn that the tale of brave, original Anne was intended not as a children's story but as a serial for one of these highly sentimental mass-market publications aimed at young women.
Céline concealed photographs of Thérèse, instead creating a new face for her through highly sentimental portraits.
"Mamaleh!" is at its highly sentimental best when Sonya sings "In My Day," about a Jewish girl's yearning to have received the education given to Jewish boys, and when she sings "Grandma's Hands," which leaves some members of the audience dabbing their eyes, and when the cast sings the Sabbath song, "Light the Candle".
If the nature of a band's work is that it must play the same hits in nearly every concert for 35 years, it would be lucky to have songs like "After the Love Is Gone," slow and highly sentimental but kind of cosmic, releasing its complexity by degrees, with a trapdoor key change, an upward modulation, stacked cycles of riffs and rhythms, and divine repetition.
I love "Talley's Folly," in spite of its highly sentimental story line and its rather transparent dénouement.
Highly sentimental by nature, Valenti manages to stay away from greatest-generational myth and concentrate on the terror he felt during a conflict that was "brutal, callous and cruel, filled with depravities".
