Word: charlatan
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There are two possibilities about Powys. One is that he is just as innocent and headlong as he seems. The other is that, like Ted Lewis or the latter-day John Barrymore, he is a master of ham-for-the-hell-of-it, a talented and laughing charlatan who gives the people super-portions of what they seem to want. In either case, he makes his audience uncomfortable, but he holds them...
...River (Paramount) brings back the heterogeneous talents of Funnyman Oscar Levant to the big-time cinema after an eleven-year pause. Fresh from successful sallies into literature (A Smattering of Ignorance) and radio (In formation, Please), Levant revives his movie career as the surly, acidulous secretary of a charlatan song writer (Basil Rathbone). This gives him a chance to rattle off some facile trills on conveniently placed pianos, berate the musical ignorance of the surrounding characters, growl an occasional wry witticism through his cavernous, smoke-filled mouth...
...radio helps the charlatan to reach his dupes and to control them. It should help still more in releasing people from their natural dupehood...
...juices. Steinach became professor of physiology at the University of Vienna. There he got interested in the idea of staving off old age, and, after many years of research, devised a sex-gland operation to "reactivate" failing men, thrice "reactivated" himself. Like Freud, he was denounced as a charlatan. Like Freud, he was chased from Vienna by the Nazis. But while Freud's notoriety slowly changed to fame, Steinach's fame has been tinged with notoriety...
...also talks it. Without using cusswords he gets an effect of violent swearing from piled-up epithets, from a trick of calling people things like "low Kanakas," "foul Corsicans." He once called Billy Rose "a penthouse Cagliostro." Suspicious, Rose inquired who Cagliostro was. Said Maney: "An 18th-Century charlatan." "Say," said Rose, "that's swell...