Word: crooked
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...rope than the one he toes in Clockwork, Sterling Hayden played a savvy gunny, Elisha Cook the pathetic hen-pecked cashier who cracks--and kills the rest of Hayden's crew. A grotesquely muscled bit-player voiced the director's point-of-view (in an incoherent Russian accent): the crook is an attractive figure when the values of traditional heroes are in question, but his actual motives are mundane, and he's apt to be a bit dumb. In addition to story, Kubrick caught the hypocritical impersonality of 50's surfaces--in an airport where Hayden is finally caught...
This spare first novel is the sleeper of the current publishing season. A sophisticated thriller, it tracks the downfall of a marginal crook-a Boston gunrunner named Eddie Coyle. The author comes from Boston's South Shore and is a 31-year-old assistant federal attorney for Massachusetts. He knows intimately the riffraff at the edge of organized crime-the pacts and betrayals, the phone calls in bars, the meetings in cafeterias and shopping centers. By using the procedures of surveillance, he is able to achieve a dumbfoundingly authentic atmosphere. Readers feel at once that they have slipped unaware...
...delights of cordon bleu cuisine. His French soups and meats periodically turn up at the guards' tables, with Friday's specialite-clam chowder-a much-anticipated luxury for his jailers. To them, he is a special inmate. Says one deputy: "Any other prisoner we call a crook, but Roger we call the chef...
...nine days later when strong evidence revealed he was linked to the Detroit Mafia. Scandals in the Civil Service Commission and the Department of Weights and Measures contributed to a growing feeling among whites that Stokes was getting rich off the city. A gut feeling that someone is a crook cannot be destroyed by factual evidence, and the power of rumors of Stokes' supposed financial misdeeds was incredible. In addition, white paranoia manifested itself in widely-circulated stories of Stokes' alleged relations with white women...
...confident in himself when going through the motions of the American business man but is a flake otherwise. Ellen Olivier is superb as his troubled wife Kate who cannot perform the slightest duty without conveying the knowledge that she has lost a son in the way and has a crook for a husband. Jeff Melvoin is quite good at presenting the idealistic side of Chris Keller but falters somewhat when he has to break down after learning of his father's crime--the weakness here is partly Miller's fault. And the other members of the cast give a suitable...