Word: hokum
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...Listening? (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Although only the title of this picture is borrowed from Tony Wons's radio activities, Are You Listening? contains sufficient broadcasting hokum to mislead the uninitiated into believing that life in a studio is a combination of hangovers, sensational denouements and bleached blondes who arrive late for the dog biscuit hour. William Haines, a continuity writer of radio hogwash, has a private office, a secretary, an insufficient salary and a venomous wife who nags him whenever he comes home, which is seldom. For love he has turned to an artist in the studio (Madge Evans...
Over the Hill (Fox) is old-fashioned cinema, dealing sadly with filial ingratitude and the poorhouse. Its story is simple, straight from the old hokum bucket: Ma Shelby (Mae Marsh) rears her children in a sacrificial way, tenderly requiring them to wash behind the ears and eat their porridge. When they mature, it is found that her ministrations have spoiled them, or else that they have inherited unhappy characteristics from their father, a bootlegger but a bad provider. One of the sons becomes a pompous hack-painter, married to a sleek and dressy strumpet. Another is an enfeebled hypocrite, whining...
Svengali (Warner). This is a vigorous example of John Barrymore's second or hokum manner. In contrast to his first or popular manner, in which the spectator's attention is directed to the beauty of his profile and his legs, the second manner (Moby Dick, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) involves the creation of sinister atmosphere by means of makeup, pale rolling eyes, false whiskers, mouth pieces used for the distortion of the teeth, and stilts in his shoes to make him look taller. He is Svengali, the musical hypnotist of the Latin quarter, in a story that...
Doctors' Wives (Fox). There is a good idea in Doctors' Wives, some passable acting, and one splendid sequence in an operating theatre. There is in it also a good solid dose of dramatic hokum and Warner Baxter's eyebrow mustache, an adornment which does not seem to become an eminent surgeon. The idea is that doctors' wives are jealous of their husbands' time and suspicious of their chances for intimate propinquity to attractive women. For Joan Bennett, daughter of a doctor, and married to the doctor (Baxter) who was called to her father...
...Living is a comedy of German extraction. It uses four characters, the two most important being a gambler and the man whom he has made his valet in lieu of pressing for payment of gaming losses. After three acts of this entertainment, one concludes that hokum is the same the whole world over. Sample lines given to the female character named Ly, who intrudes into the gambler's flat: "They called me the tiger cat?and they had good reason for it. ... So he's the master and you're the valet, eh? Life's queer sometimes...