Word: gangsterized
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...shoot a barrel of profits on a daring experiment: The Jazz Singer (produced by Zanuck), which starred Al Jolson and ended silent films with a spoken line ("You ain't heard nothing yet, folks!"). Always keen to sense a popular trend, Zanuck took advantage of the movies' gangster cycle by featuring such early hair-triggered tough guys as Edward G. (Little Caesar) Robinson...
...Hayden, a country-boy from Boone County, Kentucky, is ridden with city dirt. He doesn't care much for the ladies (principally Jean Hagen) but admits a weakness for horses. "Math luck's just gotta change," he observes, but one fears that it never does. As farm boy turned gangster, Hayden is supposed to give a new slant to the gun-slinging mobster--victim of environment, sentimental, lovable. Impossible lines and Hayden's mouthing of them preclude a convincing portrayal...
...movie, Sincerely Yours, was a box-office bust ("high admissions"), Humphrey Bogart was explaining why his latest movie, The Desperate Hours, was not a box-office bonanza: "Maybe it was because of the dignity label on the film-they didn't let people know it was a gangster film. Maybe it's because of momism these days, and no one cares if pop is in danger of having his head bashed...
...years from 1920 to 1935. Such niceties as the bulletproof car, the sawed-off shotgun, and the one-way ride* were either inaugurated or raised to their ultimate refinement in Chicago. Such blood-spattered tableaux as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and the killing of Gangster Dion O'Banion in a fern bank in his florist shop, glamoured up in Chicago's Front Page newspaper tradition, shocked and thrilled a generation of Americans and Europeans...
Eddie's break came five years ago, when Chanteuse Edith Piaf decided that his craggy face, husky build and American accent fitted him for the role of a gangster in her music hall revue. "She taught me about singing," he says. By good luck and some whopping exaggerations about his American experience, he next broke into the French movies, where he became a smash in American tough-guy roles. In a remarkable bit of legerdemain, he transferred his popular film personality to his singing style, mixing toughness and sentiment. Onstage he wears a sharply cut suit and sings...