Word: grade-b
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...Miss Renay was hurried off to California's Terminal Island on a three-year perjury charge, the adjectives were no longer necessary. Her name said it all. Liz Renay--one-time winner of a Marilyn Monroe look-alike contest, four times divorced and occasional artist--had herself become a grade-B, low-budget Hollywood legend even though the studios had long since black balled her for fear of her shadowy connections...
Director Robert Wise and his quartet are so expert at sustaining suspense that they almost disguise The Andromeda Strain's great pretense. Despite its trappings, the plot employs nothing but the conventional weaponry of the grade-B thriller. Andromeda strains for significance and emerges as very modest entertainment. Still, in its darker moments, like THX 1138, it does a thorough job of belittling science as savior...
...fishing expedition that was to find nothing, the agency's head urged his men to uncover what they could about Nader's "women, boys, etc." Tipped by friends that investigators were looking into his private life, Nader charged publicly that he was being harassed. G.M.'s use of grade-B spy-movie tactics was fully exposed when its president, James Roche (now chairman), was summoned before a Senate subcommittee and twice apologized to Nader for the company's investigation...
Died. Bart Lytton, 56, short-term titan of the savings and loan business; of a heart attack; in Los Angeles. A onetime theatrical pressagent, grade-B screenwriter ("I'm a lot prouder of some of the mortgages I've written"), and scriptwriter for radio's Gangbusters, Lytton used Broadway promotional techniques to build his Los Angeles-based Lytton Financial Corp. into a $700 million business. Overextension and the collapse of the California housing boom started his downfall in the mid-'60s, and creditors moved in to depose him in April 1968. "Money," he once said...
...dialogue sounds like a Grade-B gangster movie on late-night television, but the script is from life. It is a chillingly real conversation that took place among three Mafia hoodlums in their hangout. The subject of the session: methods of dispatching associates to a better world. This and other candid peeps at organized crime became available last week when a 2,000-page transcript of FBI tape recordings was filed in Federal District Court in Newark, N.J. The tapes were presented by the district attorney in connection with extortion-conspiracy charges against Simone Rizzo ("Sam the Plumber") De-Cavalcante...