Word: hocus-pocus
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...Georgia Burke)-to a tree house in a wood. It is not only a revolt against ugly materialism, but an escape from reality. The trio are joined in their tree by a judge; and the quartet sits about, lonely and lost, wishing and dreaming aloud. After some dime-novel hocus-pocus breaks in on their dream world, Dolly goes home to face reality, and her realistic sister Verena is humbled into seeking love...
Teele thinks much of this statistics' argument is 'hocus-pocus.' "How can you always tell whether a placement office has put the man in the job or not?" he asks. By way of demonstrating his point, he tells the story of a student whom he once referred for a job to the "Boston Herald." The "Herald" interviewer sent him to a friend at the "Boston Globe." The "Globe" man thought the student had great potentialities and tried to find him a job with a publisher. The publisher had no openings, but remembered a friend on another Boston paper. This...
...flipping gangster he plays on the screen. They do nothing to repair the picture's ingrained faults. As Director Seaton himself demonstrated in Miracle on 34th Street, the supernatural elements of a fantasy are best played off against the familiar realities of an everyday world. Instead, the coy hocus-pocus of For Heaven's Sake takes place in the never-never land of Hollywood farce...
...characters than because of any sparkling writing. At that point, however, the author becomes carried away by the on and offstage witchery. Toward the end, the play assumes the quality of a poor Charles Addams cartoon. A good deal of the enchantment has gone from van Druten's hocus-pocus...
...jailhouse and most of the county stands outside trying to decide when to lynch him, a few conscience-stricken citizens (including Claude Jarman Jr. and David Brian as a lawyer) set out to prove his innocence. The path they take to clear him leads to such Tom Sawyerish hocus-pocus as grave-robbing and fishing in quicksand for a vanished corpse...