Word: carson
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Muscle journalism includes the gentle arts of kidnapping, wire tapping, burglary, bribery, plus cunning and unlimited nerve. Frank Carson gave it its name and was one of its chief practitioners. Out of it, in the '20s, came journalistic legends and one ripsnorting play, The Front Page...
Last week when Frank Carson, 60, died, Playwright Charles MacArthur (coauthor with Ben Hecht of The Front Page} declared: "He was the newspaperman's dream of a city editor-a hatchet man with a heart of gold...
...Carson's desk, at Hearst's Chicago Herald & Examiner, was an arsenal of blank search warrants, summonses, writs, a full repertory of badges for police, detectives, sheriffs, coroners, Federal agents. When a story broke Carson simply faked an appropriate document. A tough, impersonating reporter or Carson himself did the rest. The evidence was usually photostated in the office, quietly returned, the forged "writ" destroyed. A dozen sets of wiretapping apparatus supplemented his arsenal...
...student dentist with a mooching Irish father (Alan Hale) whose philosophy is: "I was never in the world cut out to be a street cleaner and there's no use reaching for the stars." Cagney loses the neighborhood strawberry blonde (Rita Hay worth) to a chiselling contractor (Jack Carson) and on rebound marries her girl friend (Olivia de Havilland). Later they visit the contractor, grown rich, where they dine under newfangled electric light. "Isn't it dangerous?" asks Olivia. Says Carson: "Not if you pay the bill...
...almost any hands, such material would yield a rank fruitcake of mere arty melodrama. But Carson McCullers tells her tale with simplicity, insight, and a rare gift of phrase. She makes its tortures seem at least as valid as the dull suburban tragedies from Farrell's or Dreiser's Midwest, commonly called lifelike. Reflections in a Golden Eye is the Southern school at its most Gothic, but also at its best. It is as though William Faulkner saw to the bottom of matters which merely excite him, shed his stylistic faults, and wrote it all out with Tolstoyan...