Word: costelloism
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Died. Frank Costello, 82, onetime "prime minister of the underworld," whose nervous hands and hoarse voice became familiar to the nation's television viewers during the Senate crime hearings of 1951; following a heart attack; in Manhattan. In the classic pattern, Costello graduated from teen-age street gangs to bootlegging to control of a national slot-machine racket with estimated annual revenues of $2 billion. By investing widely in police, legislators and legitimate businesses, "Uncle Frank" became a power in New York City politics. He managed to elude any major convictions until his reluctance to testify fully before Senator...
...here, lumpy with paraphrase but still amusing. We are reminded of Thurber's feats as a rewrite man for the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune, his 20 successive rejections when he began submitting stories to The New Yorker, and all those cartoons on the walls of Costello's Bar. Harold Ross, The New Yorker editor, reappears in his role as the most woodenheaded genius in modern literature (Thurber made him funny in The Years with Ross, but he did not make him believable, a lapse that Biographer Holmes fails to note...
Harvard won't need an adjuster back against B.U.'s offensive system, so the loss of adjuster Steve Golden, sidelined with a leg injury, will not cause any immediate problems. Dave St. Pierre will move into the secondary, and Restic hopes that sophomore Mike Costello will come back from his injury to give the Crimson some depth. At 5'9", 170 pounds, Costello won't give the Crimson's small defensive backfield much size...
...Samurai-The Godson, Alain Delon appears as a French gangster with the unlikely name of Jeff Costello, an icy and dogged professional who kills the manager of a Paris night club and then is set upon by the people who hired him. The flics, too, pursue Costello. He tries to work his way out of his classic quandary with characteristic efficiency, by dodging the cops even as he hunts down the men who are hunting...
Like a samurai warrior, Costello is obsessed by ritual, whether it is pulling on a pair of white gloves before he uses his revolver or standing in front of a mirror adjusting the brim of his hat until it is just so. The hat, unfortunately, looks like a felt pie pan, and Delon moves mechanically through the action. Melville means to pay sober hom age to all the Hollywood films that did all this but better. It is a pity that for all its virtues, The Godson's patina of high seriousness renders every scene forced and selfconscious...