Word: hokum
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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When he returns after this idyll, his family are still so impossible that he deserts them forever for Miss Cowl. Not, however, before she has given them a rhetorical strafing which is the epitome of hokum...
...promotional "hokum" was this. Mr. Cord, an artful automotive engineer, a great salesman, an inspired executive and a wise financier, took over the management of the Auburn Automobile Co. in 1924 when it was building obsolescent cars and losing money. He reorganized manufacturing processes, designed new models,* perked up the sales force. Since 1926 he has made Auburn show a yearly increasing profit, and, even more momentously, sent its stock from a low of $31.75 in 1925 to a high of $514 this year.† Since then he has been buying parts manufacturers - Lycoming Manufacturing Co. (automobile and aviation engines...
...Goes to War (Inspiration). The cinema has had a dreadful time trying to be convincing about the War. The Big Parade was fine for a couple of reels until the old hokum began to stick out. This picture is like The Big Parade in the way some of the battle scenes are handled, but except when mechanical explosions give it energy it is an entirely unreal lyric about a Southern girl who had two sweethearts, one of whom turned out to be a coward. He was drunk when the bugle blew, and when she told...
...boss in Missouri to run as dummy candidate for Mayor. So potent has been his appeal over the footlights that he gets all the women's vote, is elected. Backstage scenes of the type resorted to here are no longer convulsive for their own sake. Nor does pleasant hokum like the sale of candy with a souvenir in each & every box, redeem the longer intervals of sluggish comedy. Henry Hull makes the actor-mayor only a conventional juvenile. The Passion Play, traditional drama of Christ's last days, has been given for more than six centuries...
There you have just about all the hokum ever used in plays about the war. Some of it falls pretty flat, too, but it is surprising how in the last two acts it manages to keep the play above water. Now and then Mr. Jessel breaks into song, and though the songs aren't much he carries them...