Word: crooked
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This primitive moral pattern is also apparent in two other of the quasi-credible series--Jack. Armstrong and Sky King. The bad men aren't so slick and brainy as the Sword, but the two heroes are correspondingly less able than Midnight. Armstrong's prowess as a crook-catcher rests on the bale of Wheatics he consumes each morning. Sky King is the executive director of troops of eager youngsters who fly all over the hemisphere making mischief, apparently on leave of absence from high school...
...story contrasts the characters and careers of a detective and a crook, both born in poor New York Italian families. The detective (Victor Mature) is reasonably intelligent, persistent, brave and ill-paid. The criminal (Richard Conte) is shrewd, unregenerate, reckless, vain, easy with the money and the girls. Conceding that the crook is much the more obviously interesting character, the movie grants him the bulk of its attention. But that is all it grants him. Without ever quite getting mealymouthed, it builds up an honest and impressive case against...
...reminding the thug that they both started with exactly the same disadvantages. Before the picture is over, the criminal has proved that law-breaking is the least of the things which put him outside the pale. Without ever showing a flicker of remorse, he double-crosses a fellow crook, murders a lawyer (elegantly played by Berry Kroeger), charms a hard spinster nurse (Betty Garde) into criminal complicity, endangers the life of a trusting floozy (Shelley Winters), lands a pathetic doctor (Konstantin Shayne) in trouble with the law, assiduously corrupts his younger brother (Tommy Cook), and does his best to exploit...
...factories. Cried Russia's Andrei Vishinsky: "Nobody will blind us and confuse us with beautiful words about the necessity of waiving part of our national sovereignty . . . The control agency would be an American agency ... an international monopolistic super-trust. [The overeager Russian-English interpreter rendered this as "superduper crook."] Our chest is strong; you cannot push us down. Our neck is not a chicken's neck...
...Casbah" has become almost as solid a cliché, in American romantic kidding, as Mae West's "Come up and see me some time" used to be. The Casbah owes its popularity to Detective Ashelbe's tried & true romantic tale about the French super-crook Pépé le Moko (Tony Martin), who just sneers at the cops as long as he keeps to the native quarter of Algiers, but doesn't dare venture outside. It is also the story of a plainclothesman (Peter Lorre) who languidly bides his time; of a native girl (Yvonne...