Word: gambler
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...inventing this super-hero Lang created an adventure film whose marvels illustrated a deep and true vision of life. He refused to people Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922) with the cardboard Bonds and Flints of today's adventure fantasies. Every character is a complex personality. In one gambling house de Witt, hunting "the Great Unknown," is distracted by the sight of an extraordinary woman, the Countess Tolst. He leaves the card table to walk to the couch on which she reposes. In two minutes Lang gives us her soul. We see no shallow temptress, no abstract sentimental heroine. The countess...
...early tracking shot that closes in on a fleeing man. The studio in which Lang shot the film must have been a prison. The cells, psychiatric or criminal, in which characters are repeatedly locked completely differ from the one cell that appeared in The Gambler. That room realized the romantic plight of its inhabitant, Mabuse's mistress: trapped by her love for him in a space which, though closed, had great depth. By betraying him she could have escaped. Her refusal left her at least the room for the full violent expression of her emotions, throwing herself upon the barred...
...rooms to starve instead, as with the first Mabuse's Richard Fleury, of working on their sensibilities to drive them to suicide. The acts of mental terror through which Mabuse controls his henchmen are cheap mechanical gimmicks. Even the scene transitions emphasize the physical. In Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler each cut to a new scene added new fantastic settings, new wonders for the intellect, new dimensions in depth for the soul. Here they limit freedom of action, tie the physical to the physical in an ever-closing...
...dealings with the Parvin/Dohrmann Co., Voloshen has indirectly connected the Speaker's office to some unsavory individuals-though McCormack himself may never have heard of them. Chief of these are Sidney R. Korshak, a Los Angeles attorney and intimate of Chicago gangsters, and Edward Torres, a mob-affiliated gambler who was involved with illegally skimming gambling proceeds in Las Vegas. Both are members of a group that controls the company...
Later, when she ventured to Scotland for her hereditary throne as the daughter of James V, she displayed a gambler's courage. Her young life revolved around theatrical plots, murders, captures and daring escapes from gloomy castles that would have been all too improbable for fiction. What romancer, for instance, would dare to have his heroine develop the one sexual passion of her life for a vain and vicious 17-year-old popinjay, then, three months after his violent death, marry the man who had not only plotted his murder but abducted and raped her, only...