Word: hokum
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...editor and onetime Washington correspondent of the Buffalo (N. Y.) evening News, was turning out press releases by the thousand, buttons, sunflowers and windshield stickers by the million. Working boss of Hoover publicity in the 1928 campaign, Press-agent Kirchhofer announced when appointed to his current post: "The usual hokum won't go in this campaign...
...turned out to be so fresh and attractive that he was convinced that he had seen the nearest approach to Utopia on earth. Java for the most part left him cold, as did Sumatra and Siam. He says that "never having been to California," Bangkok is the most hokum place he has ever seen...
...situation lays a heavy burden on the firm's scenarists. Little Miss Nobody is evidence to the effect that they are not capable of carrying it without considerable strain. It is a superannuated fable about peewees at the poor farm, a mixture of practical jokery, youthful fixations and hokum melodrama. Caustic little Miss Withers is most successful when, as the black sheep of an orphan asylum, she steals Thanksgiving turkeys from a grocer's truck, chants superbly a ballad called Then Came the Indians...
...Deeds Goes to Town (Columbia). Columbia's star team of Writer Robert Riskin and Director Frank Capra are co-masters of a unique kind of U. S. comedy, part farce, part fantasy and part pure hokum, which has been often imitated but never successfully copied since they brought it to the screen in It Happened One Night. This time, in Clarence Budington Kelland's ingenious story about the misfortunes of a humble young man who inherits $20,000,000, they have a perfect show case for their specialty...
...coincided with the death of Marilyn Miller, onetime Ziegfeld star, comes under the head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer routine. Its result is more surprising. At once biography and able extravaganza, The Great Ziegfeld approximates, more closely than any show he ever produced himself, the Ziegfeldian ideal. Pretentious, packed with hokum and as richly sentimental as an Irving Ber lin lyric, it is, as such, top-notch entertainment...