Word: cardsharp
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Actor George Segal plays a mean banjo, as he demonstrated last week at a party for his new film, The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox. Trouble is, he doesn't gamble, shoot or ride horses, skills he needed for his part as a shady-dealing frontier cardsharp in the movie. So last year, while George was on location with the film in Colorado, the studio recruited a professional cardsharp from Las Vegas to teach him how to cut the deck, and some genuine cowboys to school him in horseplay. He seemed a natural for the saddle; after all, recalled...
Odious. About La Tour's life and character, very little is known. The man is faceless-the more so, because he left no known self-portrait; it is just possible that the quick-eyed, copper-haired young cheat at the right in The Cardsharp with the Ace of Diamonds may be La Tour himself. But his life is mostly conjecture, strung between a few documentary signposts. He was born in 1593, at Vic, a town in the duchy of Lorraine. At some time between 1610 and 1616, he is assumed to have gone to Italy and worked in Rome...
...Tour's themes was the vanity and vulnerability of youth; he embodied it in his extraordinary masterpiece The Cardsharp with the Ace of Diamonds. A boy, caparisoned in plumes, brocade and lace, is gambling against a courtesan who is about to get, from the cardsharp's waistband, the crucial ace. It is a familiar genre situation, but La Tour impregnated it with a subtle psychological tension. The shifty ballet of the eyeballs runs its counterpoint to the expressive gestures of the hands - the soft, uncertain dandyism in the boy, the momentary apprehension of the serving girl, whose glance...