Word: hod
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Link's story is simple enough. He was an orphan from The Narrows, the Negro slum of Monmouth, down by the river. He had been brought up by Aunt Abbie Crunch, a former schoolteacher and a lady of almost painful rectitude. But Bill Hod had been an even greater influence than Abbie. Hod was the Negro owner of the Last Chance, a coldblooded, iron-fisted racketeer who paid Link's way. through college and wised him up to life. The trouble began when Camilo, Mrs. Treadway's daughter, met Link down at the docks one foggy night...
...shaky scaffolding of Italian politics, Premier Alcide de Gasperi worked warily to mortar together a new government for Italy, his eighth since the war. He could no longer count on the three small parties of his coalition to help carry the hod. Two were so hurt by the June elections that they barely counted any more, and the Democratic Socialists of Giuseppe Saragat, cut down to 19 seats, decided to quit the team...
...tired, he finds his way to a corner cantina. "Do we make a deal?" he asks the barkeeper. "Why not?" says the barkeep, and pours out a liter of pulque. Wiping the milky froth from his lips, the organ grinder then reels off three numbers that have the hod carriers at the bar singing at the tops of their voices...
...charming Billo had slathers of luck. It had never deserted him in the years in which he lifted himself from stoker to hod carrier to bartender to cop to D.A. to brigadier general in the U.S. Army to mayor. It did not desert him when the roof began falling in on him at city hall. Democratic bosses figured a special city election in 1950 would be just the thing to rouse the faithful and help put a Democrat in the governor's chair in Albany. Harry Truman swallowed hard, but in the hope (later proved false) of carrying...
...which is neither comic nor relieving. It rather adds to the strain. In short, there is little more universally entertaining that a western, especially in technicolor, even when written to a formula. But if action becomes drudgery, if lines are sighed instead of spat, and if actors look like hod-carriers hurrying to get a union-day's work done, the series of scenes moves like a man blind with amnesia. LAURENCE D. SAVADOVE