Word: hokum
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...years in vaudeville never let a custard pie go unthrown and grew rich, together with Straight Man "Ole" Olsen (currently touring in Europe), by endlessly repeating their zany show, Hellzapoppin, a unique blend of slapstick and what O & J christened "gonk," which they defined as "hokum with raisins in it"; of a kidney ailment; in Las Vegas...
...Russian language record played at too slow a speed, and walking with all the grace of Kate Smith in a cha cha contest. In addition to this, Eisenstein switches somewhat incongruously from black-and-white to color to bronzetone, and though some might call this kaleidoscopic, I call it hokum...
...Hokum accretes; Coop plays shady scenes with an oil-slick partner (Michael Wilding) and a blackmailer (Eric Portman). Every five minutes or so, Actress Kerr's lip trembles; Coop says, "We're going home and talk this thing through," and sure enough, they do. It is a fine, sentimental thing to watch Coop walk across a room, long arms held out from his hips, hands curving in toward invisible six-guns, and it is a useful time killer, while the plot boils on, to speculate about how a director might have made Coop a credible villain...
Author Schirmbeck is a metaphysical novelist of considerable imagination and hubris who is desperately concerned with recementing the duality whose halves are customarily called reason and feeling, truth and grace, science and morality, or mathematics and poetry. A character in his novel-itself a disturbing duality, part murky hokum, part stark reality-expresses the wish to be the first poet of modern physics. Clearly he speaks for the author, a German science-journalist, and if Schirmbeck's book falls short of poetry and has some irritating left-wing political overtones, it is nevertheless an extraordinary novel of ideas...
...Time Machine (George Pal; MGM) deserves a place on the very short list of good science fiction films partly because its hokum is entrancing, its special effects expertly rigged and its monsters sufficiently monstrous. But the picture's major virtue is that its human characters are compounded not of green cheese or ground-up Dracula scripts, as is customary in such ventures, but of flesh, blood and imagination...