Word: gangsterisms
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Sworn Enemy (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). A first-rate screen play by Wells Root and a first-rate performance by Joseph Calleia make this otherwise ordinary Gangster v. Government film agreeably nerve-racking. Calleia is Joe Emerald, neurotic head of a protection racket who, because his own legs are so weak he cannot walk without two canes, has set his heart on becoming proprietor of a heavyweight champion prizefighter. The Root screen play shows how a G-man (Robert Young), who has inherited a promising young plug-ugly from a brother the racketeer has killed, uses this obsession to bait...
...tale revolves around Johnnie Stark, a petty gangster who fought with razors, picked up one girl after another, married, led his gang against the gangs of other slum districts, was eventually killed when hoodlums caught him without his weapons. His story is paralleled by that of his brother, Peter, who was driven by a fierce determination to get out of the slums, became a white-collar worker, married a good, respectable girl, but landed in trouble when he was forced to lead a strike. Aside from these two, the clearest characterization is Lizzie, Johnnie's wife, who married beneath...
Since the publication of Walter Burns's The Saga of Billy the Kid in 1926, romanticized accounts of the lives of Western desperadoes have become as commonplace in the U. S. literary scene as gangster films in the cinema. Last week the appearance of a routine volume dealing with a minor Texas badman not only revealed how thoroughly this particular field of Americana had been combed but suggested that a work of definite historical value might be produced if Western biographers would turn their eyes away from the gunsmoke of legend that surrounds their heroes and concentrate...
...Enemy's Wife (Warner) is another salty little treatise on the G-man, whose habits, indoors and out, are of such moment to Warner Brothers. Here the G-man (Pat O'Brien) and his partner (Robert Armstrong) are to be seen engaged in a man hunt for Gangster Gene Maroc (Cesar Romero) whom they expect to find loitering jealously near his ex-wife (Margaret Lindsay). The crisis of the picture arrives during a wedding ceremony which, planned as a trap for Gangster Maroc, fails when Maroc, instead of shooting the bridegroom, merely snickers at him from the organ...
...Hearstian International News Service "on principle," Editor Pew found a resounding forum for his views. Among his antipathies is Gossip Columnist Walter Winchell, who tried to make capital of the Philadelphia jailing and was ringingly denounced by Editor Pew as: "A Broadway scavenger ... a physical coward ... a journalistic gangster...