Word: hokum
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...soso. The film has moved too slowly, and Andy Griffith in his first movie role has been uneven and never quite convincing; but Patricia Neal has provided a sensitive study of what it is like to be in love with a hokum Yokum. And then the villain hits the top. He goes hog-wild, and so does Director Kazan. Instead of keeping the menace down to life size, the script permits its corn-fed psychopath to sphacelate through the U.S. social body like some malignant growth, until he actually threatens to take over the Federal Government. As the driving force...
GLENPORT, ILLINOIS, by Paul Darcy Boles (424 pp.; Mocm/7/on; $4.95), may remind readers that oldtime dispensers of sweetness and light like Gene Stratton Porter (A Girl of the Limberlost) and Grace Livingston Hill (Rainbow Cottage, Happiness Hill) at least put heart into their hokum. Paul Darcy Boles merely puts hokum into the heart. The Grayleafs are newcomers to Glenport, 111., a whistle stop near Chicago. It is 1929, and Ave Grayleaf, the father, is a baker, as busy and happy as all the seven dwarfs. Homespun Ave has the American flag tattooed on his right arm and a bad case...
Soon you'll both be wondering whether this is the "right person" whether for such mixed up minds anybody could be the "right one;" whether perhaps romance is hokum and anybody could be the "right one;" whether today's confused Youth can make sane decisions about the appropriateness of love, of sex, of marriage (pause for breath); whether all this decision stuff isn't negation of the basically inspirational quality of the Perfect Love; or whether maybe sex isn't everything but it's a hell of a lot easier than all this stuff; and so on around again...
...number called "Amuse Yourself," Miss Scott was joined by Barbara Forester, Hugh Fortmiller, and Colgate Salsbury for another of the evening's best features. The hokum about Arabs and the Foreign Legion which preceded it, like much of the Stephen Charnas-Andre Gregory book, seemed diffuse and veering almost instinctively toward the trite. Their happiest moment was a parody of Little Red Riding Hood which held its own pretty well with Jack Webb's and the score of other lampoons. Their version of an opera rehearsal was good fun too, although the staging sometimes let affected confusion substitute for hilarity...
Himself a longtime newsman (Philadelphia Record, New York Post), Author Grafton has found no startling truths about big crime-his plot in the end becomes downright hokum-but he offers many fascinating insights: how it feels before a holdup, the psychology of crap shooting, the relaxed domesticity enjoyed by the off-duty criminal. He can also be quietly amusing, as when he compares a detective's carefully indirect questions about a robbery ("I hear some pals stopped in to see you last night") to a modern poet who must find "some oblique and more beautiful way of indicating what...