Word: gangsterisms
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...snug, smug plutocracy of the International Settlement and the more raffish French Concession. Since the Japanese took over the Chinese city in 1937, the Settlement has been an island in a sea of intrigue and guerrilla warfare. Round it have prowled gunmen, tough, graft-hungry Japanese soldiers, the gangster bravos and police of the puppet Nanking Government...
...Haiti they called on a rich cream-colored Harvard classmate of Big Boy's and saw a libidinous so-called voodoo dance. In England Longstreet talked to a nice tart and a nice Lord. In Paris there was a countess who admired gangster slang: "What do you know, you mug, about this gimmick?" In Germany he saw the old vicious guns of World War I scrapped in a field near Kiel, read in the papers of an America no American has ever seen, and talked to a brave old pastor who was ''headed as sure as Christ...
Hold That Ghost (Universal) is about that haunted house Universal has been making and remaking these many years. It is not much of a house, but Abbott & Costello are in it and that makes it funny. They inherit it from a murdered gangster, refuse to be frightened out of it by the ectoplasmic machinations of their donor's mob, hold on until they hit the jackpot: the dead gangster's fortune cached in a moosehead. This feeble chronicle is considerably enhanced by such sure-fire episodes as greaseball Lou Costello climbing in bed with a ghost...
...seen "the Duchess" when she entered San Quentin, a fox-faced, shabby murderess, bound for death in a gas chamber. Through the cell blocks the grapevine carried her story: that she (Juanita Spinelli), her common-law husband, Mike Simeone, and Thug Gordon Hawkins had drugged and drowned a gangster. Later another bulletin: a 30-day reprieve for the three by Governor Culbert Olson. Later still: "She's going to sniff it [lethal gas] just the same...
Spartanburg's festival has no rich backers, no imported stars. In last week's Requiem the tenor soloist was an insurance agent, the baritone a city councilman who is in the sand business. A music-store clerk was the rollicking gangster hero of the 18th-Century low-lives in the Beggar's Opera; his moll was Ruth Ives, Converse voice teacher and operatic production manager...