Word: mountebanking
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...gives excuse for the presence of George M. Cohan. And it does not content itself with a single exhibition of its star but must with unparalleled magnanimity, offer him to the audience twice, once as T.K. Blair, the nominee for the presidency of the land, and again as the mountebank who is hired as a double to make up for the lack of sex appeal. The audience won't tire of its favorite and the producers haven't used him over-abundantly. The double exposure escapes the cleverest eye and the exposition of two characters will hold the attention...
Four political manipulators who can nominate a President tell a dour statesman that he lost the nomination and his one chance for national sex appeal when Claudette Colbert refused to marry him. But when they see a medicine show in which a silver-tongued mountebank and his assistant (Jimmy Durante) are selling their medical compound, they see the natural resemblance between the showman (Actor Cohan) and the Statesman (Actor Cohan). They hatch a plan to elect the statesman president on the show-window antics of the showman. Miss Colbert and the statesman's butler are deceived by the imposture...
...flamboyant," "hot-tempered." Other words, complimentary or vituperative, might occur to commentators biased one way or the other. For instance the Scripps-Howard Express (now the Rocky Mountain News) six years ago chose these brands for Publisher Bonfils and his Post: "shame," "disgrace," "bandit," "brigand." "lawless," "bunco," "scaly monstrosity," "mountebank," "... a blackmailing, blackguarding, nauseaus (sic) sheet which stinks to high heaven and which is the shame of newspapermen the world over." But neither friend nor foe could call Publisher Bonfils "sensitive." Journalistic rough-&-tumble was his particular meat. He was an able name-caller himself. The battle of the Post...
...careful settings, imaginatively done, and the capable photography and camera-angles. There is a consistent tone to the piece, a tone that was lacking in "Frankenstein," with its weakening comedy interludes. The extravagance and absurdity of the plot is somehow reconciled by the opening scene sin the mountebank's tent, which set the key for shivery theatricality. Mirakle, showman that he is, can heap leer on leer and only add to our pleasure...
...Author. In the days when Chicago was having a literary renaissance Ben Hecht was one of the better-known in a group that included Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters. Called variously iconoclast, intellectual mountebank, "in-sincere fiddler," "Pagliacci of the Fire Escape," Hecht was famed for his conversation; "his subtle innuendoes, his philosophical observations, his penetrating irony, his vehement indignation, his gentle persuasiveness, his dubious facts." Once a collaborator with Maxwell Bodenheim, Hecht soon quarreled with him: the quarrel is still going on.* Mustachioed, with rumpled hair, pouchy eyes, Ben Hecht looks like what...