Word: cardsharper
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...scene Janet Evans arrives in a lobby next to Heaven and begins to read the histories of the lives which would have been bound up with hers if she had stayed on earth: a disheartened Kansas City playwright; a female derelict whose seducer has abandoned her in Montreal; a cardsharp and the banker's daughter he is scheming to marry; a young socialite condemned for murder; a Manhattan play-boy and his mistress. Only in Act II, when she comes to read the projection of her own life as she should have lived it. does her role in their...
...that the only golddiggers who made fortunes were the middlemen; he went back to hunting and trapping for a living. "Gold-digging," says he, "is a horrid occupation, but a bit better than begging." In Alaska and northern Canada he met many an eccentric adventurer. Dawson Tom was a cardsharp whose favorite dodge for getting free drinks was to produce what looked like a stick of dynamite in a crowded saloon, shout: "Closing time! The pub is going up!" and light the fuse. When the novelty of this trick wore off he substituted a rocket for the nonexplosive "dynamite." Finlander...
Casanova was an imposing figure over six feet tall: "satiric, satanic, sensuous. An ugly man, swarthy, hawklike, with beady eyes . . . thin elongated nose." A charlatan, cardsharp, liar, forger, adulterer, seducer, jailbird, he was still a "student of humanities . . . connoisseur of the arts and sciences, philosopher, dramatist and poet." A worldly man, with few illusions, Casanova had some profound convictions. "It was one of his staunchest beliefs, one that he retained to his dying day, that lack of sexual expression is followed by a mortal illness." Though his memoirs are never wholly to be believed, the two adventures of which...
Alias the Deacon (Jean Hersholt). As in the play of the same name, the hero's occupation is fleecing the wicked rich to invest the righteous poor. An angel-faced cardsharp, he blandly deals his opponents four nines, a flush, a straight, a full house, only to stagger the crowd by slapping down a royal straight flush for his own account, thus taking the largest poker pot ever staked in that town. With the proceeds he raises a mortgage, facilitates a wedding, stores up treasure in Heaven. Then he ambles into a box car and shuffles off to other...