Word: hokum
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King Solomon's Mines. Darkest Africa in brightest Technicolor reduces the hokum of H. Rider Haggard's plot to a minor hardship on moviegoers; with Deborah Kerr and Stewart Granger (TIME...
...Rostand's design rather than in the liberties it takes with his text. Flamboyantly theatrical, the play is given to such bald devices as the balcony scene in which Cyrano gulls Roxane into taking his voice for Christian's. Such broad strokes of old-fashioned footlight hokum seem glaringly magnified by the realistic eye of Director Michael Gordon's camera. The hard scrutiny of the lens also shows less mercy !han the stage for Cyrano's soft core of unblushing sentiment, unstinted gallantry, unending heroics. In this harsh light, middle-aged moviegoers who loved Cyrano...
...Lawless (Paramount) is not only a good movie but, considering its makers, it is also as unexpected as a slum documentary by Cecil B. DeMille. Produced by William H. Pine and William C. Thomas (the "Dollar Bills"), longtime Hollywood specialists in low-budgeted blood & thunder hokum (Captain China, El Paso), it is an honest, unpretentious picture about racial prejudice and mob violence...
...Director Frank Capra has done just that in this remake of his 1934 hit, Broadway Bill. With basically the same Robert Riskin script, at least seven character actors playing their original roles and Capra repeating his crafty directorial touches, the new movie is as beautifully turned a piece of hokum...
Written with some pungent dialogue and played as if it really mattered, the movie manages to keep its hokum fairly lively. Joan's fans will be glad to find that, for all her suffering, the wages of sin never loom quite as large as the dividends. They may also glean some thrill from the script's implied message: a woman's decision to walk out on a grubby home and poor provider is virtually an inalienable right...