Word: hokum
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...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...
...Hokum of the highest type has long been the priceless stock-in-trade of Robert Emmet Sherwood. Like all fictionists, he has perfected a basic story which serves as the standard framework of his profitable product. In a Sherwood play, the boy practically never gets the girl for keeps. But the lovers generally have a few final poignant moments together. Before Hannibal went back to Carthage in The Road to Rome (1927), he spent one night with Amytis. Before Archduke Rudolf Maximilian von Habsburg was rushed out of Austria in Reunion in Vienna (1931), he was vouchsafed an evening with...
From the point of view of vitality, Ben Hecht's stories are only mildly, Kay Boyle's bitterly, alive. A theatrical, rococo writer, Showman Hecht spreads hokum and verbiage with a lavish hand. Most effective in this swollen vein when he writes about the greasepaint dramatics of Broadway or the alcoholic hilarities of fabulous newshawks, at his middling worst he seems a dim shadow of O. Henry or Edgar Allan Poe. Best story in the book (Snowfall in Childhood) stands out like Shirley Temple on the stage of the Grand Guignol: a simply written reminiscence of first love...