Word: gambler
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Batchelor had impressive good looks, plenty of money and a good heart, but what he wanted most was respectability. When he came a-wooing Lucy, a lovely Richmond widow, he did not dare tell her that he had started life in an orphanage, that he had become a riverboat gambler and made a fortune in supply deals with the Union Army during the Civil War. But Lucy knew goodness when she saw it, and went off with him to Louisiana to live at Cindy Lou, a plantation Clyde had coveted when he passed it on the river. When he made...
Unlike most Broadway plays. The Gambler tries to say something. But though Playwright Betti shows metaphysical courage, he has little dramatic force. What with rhetorical flights on wings that collapse, and philosophical depth bombs that refuse to explode, the play is at most an interesting dud. It has suggestions of Pirandello without his wit, of Kafka without his vivid symbolism, of Dostoevsky without his vision, and of 19th century German romanticism with all its sentimentality. Nothing comes to life, least of all the language...
...Next day the Sun-Times splashed the testimony all over the paper. Gilbert had told the committee that he had made his money while a cop because he "bet on elections . . . bet on football games . . . bet on prizefights . . . [and in fact] I have been a gambler at heart." The Kefauver Committee complained bitterly about the printing of the testimony, but the Sun-Times replied that it had published it in the public interest...
...While a gambler named Oakhurst, a lady of ill-repute, and a drunkard are indeed present in 20th Century Fox's The Outcasts of Poker Flat, it would require copious use of an opium pipe to discover any further similarities between the film and the Bret Harte story of the same moniker. This is not to say that the net result isn't mildly diverting, which it is, though the melodrama gets a little sticky around the fourth reel...
...version of Outcasts concerns itself primarily with a bank robber, the robber's wife, and the gambler, plus considerable window dressing provided by other blizzard-bound characters. It also makes a remarkable value judgment to the effect that bank robbers are a scurvy lot, while full time gamblers are engaged in an honorable if unusual profession. This distinction no doubt will distress Senator Kefauver, but it was calmly accepted by the clientele of the Metropolitan Theatre...