Word: pocus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...dismal hocus-pocus which seems to confuse its actors as much as it fails to frighten its audience. The Black Cat is the work of Director Edgar Ulmer. Silly shot: the Black Mass, with Karloff intoning Latin gibberish...
...year. I spend all of it. I produce nothing-am doing no work. I (the type) can keep on doing this all my life unless the present social system is changed. . . . The work of the working people, and nothing else, produces the wealth which by some hocus-pocus arrangement is transferred to me, leaving them bare. While they support me in splendid style, what do I do for them? . . . I am not aware of doing anything...
...greenbackery. If he voted against it, veterans would never forgive him. About the House Chamber circulated pitiful pleas that the Administration help its friends out of their predicament by getting the Ways & Means committee to report the bill unfavorably before the petition becomes effective, a piece of parliamentary hocus-pocus that would stave off a record vote...
...what he calls the "mystery of retail price"; all that emerges is that for some occult reason the price of most articles is from two hundred to twenty-six hundred per cent higher in the stories than when they are landed in New York. An even more incredible hocus-pocus is put forth by Edward Robinson in a piece called "Musical Slaughter-House"; with remarkably little solid evidence to support him, he advances the thesis that the appeal made to the people last spring to support the Metropolitan Opera by monetary contributions was really a plot of the directors...
Constance Bennett, as Carla, the alluring Russian spy, strives vainly to convince us that "Marx brothers hocus-pocus" was a thing of the past, specifically of the World War era. We can believe many things, but we cannot swallow this story. Carla passionately loves Rudi, who is in the intelligence department of Austria, and she pursues ugly pseudo-Gypsies so that she may give them important messages to take back to dear old Russia. She writes cryptic notes with invisible ink; she is always just about to cross the border; she sees the dirty fingernails of a Russian soldier with...