Word: crooked
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...British Poetaster Rowland Howard Wholesale street-corner thefts of St. Paul newspapers approached 1,500 copies every Sunday; every petty crook in town seemed anxious to make a killing by running the contraband across the Mississippi into Minneapolis. In Minneapolis itself, Mrs. Florence Kennan's butcher, as a favor to a good customer, slipped her a hot copy of the St. Paul Pioneer Press-wrapped to resemble a leg of lamb. Two people fainted in the crush of eager newspaper buyers around a downtown Minneapolis newsstand. Hyman P. Shinder's kiosk, the biggest in town, collected a crowd...
...only broke but hopelessly in the red-by $12 million according to his own figures, by $20 million according to Texas' Attorney General Wilson. "The sad part of it," says a Pecos bank president, "is that he could have been an honest millionaire instead of a broke crook." Billie Sol grew up in an environment of a sort that is supposed to produce not crooks but plain, solid, honest people-the kind often referred to as the salt of the earth. One of six children, he was raised on a prairie farm near Clyde, Texas...
...Life is an auction." she tells him. "Men put up their muscles or their brains, women their bodies. It's all the same." Sellers finally comprehends. Putting up his brains, trimming his beard, he pursues what he can now clearly see is the good life. He overpowers the crook he works for and spirals upward, swiftly becoming an international financier, running stupendous treasuries through his fingers like sand. The camel jumps gracefully through the eye of the needle into the sheer heaven of riches on earth...
Like the play, the picture does not rigorously develop a plot. It establishes a milieu, a geography of moral failure, an ultimate, absolute flophouse. And in this flophouse it engenders characters as straw breeds lice: a smalltime crook, a sentimental whore, a police spy who regularly gets beaten by his wife, an alcoholic actor, a slugnutty wrestler, a landlord and landlady like two scorpions in a bottle, and watching them all a funny little old man who laughs and laughs and shakes his head and says, "Oh, the way people live...
...clever painterfeiter (Joseph Wiseman), Rex artnaps a Velásquez from a castle in Spain. But a sinister grandee (Grégoire Aslan) steals it back, and before long bodies are dropping almost as fast as bum mots ("I want so much to be a first-class crook for you, darling"). Rita, 42 when this picture was made, and Rex, 53, are both old enough to know better...