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which they were innocent was a guaranteed sob-provoker, but incarceration was a main pursuit, providing original and continuous motive for escape.
When we saw Madelon Claudet deserted by her lover, and to give her unborn son a name forced to marry a man she did not love, and on top of that serve a stretch in prison for a crime of which she knew nothing, we witnessed three surefire bids for sympathy. Purpose ? Creating a main pursuit, a past black enough to make concealment of that past really mean something. Debasing herself to procure money for her son's education was hokum, but that abasement was essential to a small part in her son's life, a main pursuit.
In Five Star Final the business of digging up a past better left buried actually clanged and rattled with the mechanics of deliberate sympathy provocation, but that action was essential to the successful furtherance of yellow journalism, a main pursuit.
When the author of Street Scene sicked the butcher boy bully onto the cringing hero, with the hero bewailing his own cowardice, he eliminated the hero as a last possible aid to the heroine when her father killed her mother. That act in itself was pure hoke, but in cutting her off from all aid, casting her into the world alone, he completed the triumph of disapprobation of cheating, a variation of a main pursuit.
In It Happened One Night the hero gave his last dollar to a waif, essence of hokum, but necessary handicapping because his interest in the runaway heiress was entirely selfish, her desire for the titled gigolo wilfully so. Incidentally, their flight needed all the continuous provocation of sympathy it could arouse to achieve any depth or reach as far as the greater audience was concerned. Helping others was a main pursuit.
In the Divorcee the woman disfigured in the auto wreck was a living indictment of man's fickle nature, provoking sympathy for all and sundry victims of that nature, and pure hoke, but essential to a high singularization of the double standard, a main pursuit.
In short, hokum can not obtrude upon furtherance of a main pursuit, when in character with, or identified as an aid to that pursuit.
That an inordinate reaching for laughs and tears is
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