Word: formulaic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...grade Hollywood corn. Sample: Dan shows up outside the bedroom window of his dying master (Henry Hull) looking as if he were prepared to read the burial service. Equally lugubrious are Dennis O'Keefe, Gail Russell and Ruth Warrick, all of whom are required by the formula plot to get badly entangled in their own emotional traces...
Diverting Frankenstein. Damon Runyon's Broadway stories were highly readable and amusing; to a large following, they stood for incisive reporting of U.S. big-city life. But, as he himself seemed to know, Runyon had created a kind of literary Frankenstein: the formula that brought him fame and money also limited his growth as a writer...
...Runyon First and Last, a collection of his earliest and last pieces, there are two mildly amusing Broadway stories and over three dozen sketches written between 1907 and 1915 in Runyon's youthful, pre-formula days. One of them, a hobo story called "The Informal Execution of Soupbone Pew," is a report of a murder told in a bantering tone reminiscent of Ring Lardner. Others are gentle spoofs on his old home town in the West, sketches of Army life in the Spanish-American War, or idyllic reminiscences of childhood...
...these countries, Communist pressure on the church has been mounting. Its immediate goal is not to root out Catholicism but to reduce it to helpless captivity. The Kremlin succeeded in that policy with the once great Russian Orthodox Church, and it is trying to repeat the formula. The trial of Cardinal Mindszenty was part of the operation. The persecution in Hungary was followed by efforts to split the Church in Czechoslovakia away from Rome...
...last," says Upton Sinclair) of the Lanny books-the author has brought his hero's adventures up to date. Apparently working on the reasonable assumption that what has pleased 1,350,000 U.S. and English customers will please them again, Sinclair sticks close to his well-exercised formula. He thrusts Lanny into every important event in the mid-1940s, records the portentous if often empty conversations of the powerful, and buttresses his story at weak points with solid slabs of historical summary...