Word: grifter
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...only one who believed him was Sparrow Saltskin, "Half Hebe 'n half crazy," a petty grifter and dog thief who adored Frankie because the Dealer was kind to him and protected him. ("Guys who think they can rough me up, they wake up wit' the cats lookin' at 'em." In an alley, he meant.) Frankie really liked Sparrow: "I'd trust him with my sister all night. Provided, of course, she wasn't carryin' more than 35 cents...
...career had lasted more than half a century. He had been a vaudeville juggler and a big name in musicomedy for decades before the sound track was invented. But millions would remember only one W. C. Fields-the gentle grifter who convulsed them in the '30s as a star of motion pictures and the radio...
...comedy was based on the oldest precept of the cardsharp and the carnival grifter-"everyone has a little larceny in his heart." When he kicked Baby Le Roy, interrupted a moment of fraudulent grief to execute a moth, or eyed a sheriff with ponderous injured dignity, his audiences admitted their spottiness of soul and rejoiced...
Second feature, "Angles Over Broadway," is a Saroyanesque romance-a drama of strange but real little folk lost in the depths of the big city. The characters are a grifter, a cafe entertainer, a drunken Pulitzer Prize playwright, and a thief, all thrown together by accident. Doug Fairbanks, Jr. as the ex-bellhop sucker-plucker and Rita Hayworth as the girl who graduated from the gutter give convincing performances in the romantic leads. And Thomas Mitchell does as fine a job with his role of the universal friend in need as Eddie Dowling did in the almost identical role...