Word: hokum
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...Hawaiian cycle and the Blues cycle, the one in which oriental types of music were most popular, and then the verse type, the one in which 'It Ain't Gonna Rain No More' was popular. Present day popular music may be classed in what is known as the 'Hokum type...
...questionable trial in behalf of his sister's betrayer. Everybody has a heart of gold. The Willard Mack type of melodrama always has a popular sentiment at the bottom, coated over with reliable gags like a little "inside stuff" on the ways of men of the world. Sometimes the hokum is worked into effective theatricality, when the play "gets across with a bang." Honor Be Damned seemed to "get across" at the first night. Playwright Mack made a speech: "Because I have so many plays running this season, people think I write them over night. Ladies and gentlemen, it takes...
They will again argue that by revealing the most intimate details they are making the men they treat more human, that they bring back a sense of balance, that they tear away the clouds of sanctified hokum which still surround such a figure as "The Martyr President" Harding, who died of eating crab-meat out of season to the end that all who exploited him Doheny, Fall, Sinclair, et al, should not be punished but should have everlasting freedom from justice...
Hangman's House. Willard Mack, the dramatist, has two other hokum-weighted melodramas currently padding his Broadway income, The Noose and Lily Sue. Compared with them, this third, from Donn Byrne's novel, is a theatrically diseased mess. The story follows the lives of a young country gentleman, Dermot McDermot (Walter Abel) and a neighboring country gentleman's daughter, Connaught O'Brien (Katherine Alexander), both born to the grassy slopes of Ireland, in love with their land, their horses, their people and each other. She is forced to marry a villain who shoots her pet race...
...waves good-bye to her Captain Flagg, not with the tricolor of France nor the stars and stripes of the U. S., but with the bedclothes. After this highpoint (which, to be frank seems to have been reached by accident) the scenario settles down some banal sob hokum about ' mother's boy," equally unfortunate comic relief by the inevitable Jewish-Irish pair of privates, and painful insinuation that Sergeant Quirt's was a case of true love for the French ma'm'selle...