Word: cons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This low-budget prison film makes several promising gestures in the direction of documentary honesty before giving up and turning slick. The result is mildly enjoyable and instantly forgettable. The narrative deals with the downfall of a boss con named Chilly (Thomas Waites), who runs a bookmaking operation and most of the other illicit action in the prison yard. He is a short, cocky fellow of 24 who keeps the other cons and a good many of the guards in line with brains and nerve, backed up by occasional knifings done by his chicano enforcer, Gasoline (Hector Troy). Chilly...
...updated model of the wood-burning stove or to futuristic solar heating systems. It is helping families in one of th Unites States's poorest regions to buy alternative sources of home energy with low-interest loans payable over decades. Doesn't sound like something your local Exxon or Con Ed would do, does...
...plays Miriam, the chief accomplice and paramour of the suave con man, Edward Pierce (Sean Connery), who masterminded England's first celebrated train heist in 1855. Miriam served as an all-purpose decoy: to help steal ?12,000 worth of gold ingots, she had to pose successively as a French courtesan, a cockney seamstress and an old beggar. Down turns each impersonation into a polished comic nugget; she swings effortlessly in and out of her various roles. Her scenes as Miriam are just as funny: in the film's best bit, Down turns the act of shaving Connery...
...tell patients that she had gone to a staff party? (She didn't.) Should she let the doctors know when she had information they did not have? (Only when she suspected one patient was planning to kill himself.) Still worse, she found herself confronted by a crazy-house con game that she dubs "reciprocal exploitation." Anybody who had money or goods was expected to share them. Could she then refuse demands for cigarettes, money or meals? Ultimately, she lent occasional cigarettes and took patients to restaurants on the grounds that meals provided interview time...
...Bruce Babbitt, is by almost all accounts serious about putting a stop to Arizona crime, and the recent prosecution of the state's two most notorious land fraud artists, Ned Warren, Sr. and Howard Woodall, has demonstrated Arizona's concern about its national reputation as a haven for every con artist and retired mobster in the country...