Word: palooka
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...Palooka, Champ. A must for kids and good for grownups, too (TIME, April...
...Palooka, Champ (Monogram). This lowly "B" production is a highly intelligent animation of Ham Fisher's comic strip-or of what the strip was before it got "significance." In really brilliant style it strikes precisely the comic-strip attitude-the understatement of motion, the two-dimensional, parodic life. The villain of the piece (Eduardo Ciannelli) never peeks out from behind his leer; the heroine (Elyse Knox) is rich but unspoiled; the hero (Joe Kirkwood Jr.) is profoundly respectful of his mother, and as innocent as if he had never had a man-to-man talk with his father...
...Palooka is discovered in "the biggest little town in Pennsylvania" by Manager Knobby Walsh (Leon Errol), who eases him over such bumps in the K.O. road as love and gangsters, and into the championship. This groggy plot even includes the scene where the hero turns to wave at his girl in the crowd and is promptly flattened by his opponent. What saves the film is its hilarious ribbing of the fight game and fight pictures...
...like H. L. Mencken and G. B. Shaw. Some of its headlines (such as its 1929 crash flash, WALL STREET LAYS AN EGG, and its STIX Nix Hix Fix, when bucolic cinemas' flopped in the hinterland) have attained a kind of backstage immortality. So have flopperoo, push over, palooka, scram, to click; and such trade phrases as "boff" (a variation of sock or punch) for smash hit, "preem," as a verb meaning to stage a premi...
...termite and That Man, and the alphabet soup of government bureaus (NRA, TVA). But the bulk of heavy coinage has come from a slew of irresponsible, word-happy inventors, including such Menckenian heroes as Variety's late Jack Conway (who coined baloney, S.A., high-hat, pushover, payoff, bellylaugh, palooka and scram) and the inventor of slanguage itself, Walter Winchell...