Word: desperado
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This wild West spoof is stacked with enough sagebrush clichés to make it high Campfire. Runty Dingus Magee, who goes around building a reputation as a desperado by taking credit for other people's crimes, is sometimes a delightful composite of all western bad men; at other times, he is merely a hapless, scheming little schnook. As a result, parts of the book are rollickingly funny parody, while other parts are slapstuck...
...flurry of excitement in 1964, when the U.S. won a few minor medals at the Olympics, but things quickly went from better to bad. Last year Americans failed to beat Europeans in a single important race. There was no reason to expect anything different this year-until a lanky desperado named William Winston Kidd went hunting in the Alps...
...sprung by the Scarperer's guileful crew, he finds himself the victim of a Gaelic doublecross. The Scarperer has arranged to have him drowned and his body washed up on the coast of France. The implausible explanation: he closely resembles a richer client of the Scarperer -a French desperado who has commissioned this elaborate plan to get himself off the Suretes most-wanted list...
...actors prove their worth. As Harvey's brother, Robert Walker gives the kind of performance that starts fan clubs springing up, and Girl Friend Sarah Miles, an ignis fatuus personified, fills her slattern's role with a kitten-in-the-rain charm that only the most heartless desperado could resist...
...Jackson, who was dazzled by a preposterous parade of a mythical black army headed by "The Supreme Undisputed Exalted Commander of the Allied Imperial African War Councils unto the Fourth and Last Generations." Yet Baldwin himself has admitted to having been tempted by the less bizarre but more sinister desperado politics of the Black Muslims. If Baldwin's sights are higher than Wright's, it is in part because Wright helped to raise them. Wright and Baldwin had had one thing in common: the demand to be treated as men. When this elementary thing is denied, no wonder...