Word: palooka
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Ever since Wallace Beery won the Best Actor Oscar in 1932 for playing a boozy palooka in The Champ, a throng of fight flicks have gained top acting nominations for two-fisted performances. HILARY SWANK, in Million Dollar Baby, vies this year for her second Best Actress award. She may be an odds-on favorite, but history tells us that most boxing roles aren't knockouts...
...cell, is visited by the now lovestruck Link. "You look beautiful!" he rhapsodizes, and she replies, "It must be the low-watt institutional lighting." Is the lighting too low for her to see the adoration sparkling in his soul? Then he must voice it: "I know a palooka like me in unworthy of a groundbreaking extremist like you." As prison scenes go, this one is more noble than "Les Miz," "Parade" and "Kiss of the Spider Woman'" put together...
...what, in all this world, is more delightful than the gay wonderful laughter of little children?" Charlie Brown stands, sets his jaw, and kicks the radio set clear out of the room. Here was a comic strip hero, who, unlike his predecessors Li'l Abner, Dick Tracy, Joe Palooka or Beetle Bailey, could take the restrained fury of the '50s and translate it into a harbinger of '60s activism...
Being a bookie is no more uncommon in South Philadelphia than being, say, a pizza-pie maker. Sure, it's illegal. But Max (whose real name is being withheld to protect his operation and Campaign Diary's wager) wonders what's the greater crime: a row-house palooka's supporting his family by offering a convenient alternative to government-run lottery bamboozles, or the fact that American public policy and the Lincoln Bedroom are for sale to the highest bidders...