Word: pedestrians
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Playing a paunchy, mother-dependent killer, Cagney empties his pistol into his victim with the calm, preoccupied expression of a pedestrian waiting for a street light to change. There is none of the shock technique of The Public Enemy -no audience-deafening gun blasts, no close-ups of the killer's eyes or of the sickening sprawl of the corpse. The new brutality is streamlined. .White Heat is sprinkled with an improved type of wrist action in blackjacking, so effective that the camera does not even bother to examine the victim. The traditional movie chase, with its essentially simple...
...Murphy was an $8,500-a-year assistant U.S. attorney, and an unknown. Throughout most of the trial his conduct had been pedestrian and plodding. Now, in his summation, he surprised everyone. He marshaled his facts impressively. He matched sarcasm with Stryker, and outdid him. When he was through, the issue was no longer Hiss's word against Chambers'; it was Hiss's word against an impressive structure of evidence...
There the movie's resemblance to Dostoevsky ends. The rich, exuberant flow of dialogue, incident and atmosphere characteristic of the Russian master has been choked to a pedestrian trickle. Dostoevsky's brilliant insights into the tortured motives and emotions of his lovers have paled into klieg-lighted stereotypes. Much of the time Peck and Miss Gardner act as if they had been stranded at a sedate costume party. In other scenes, when they try for a truly Slavic intensity, they seem to be acting out a burlesque on the whole school of Russian novelists. A few supporting players...
...became the first big city of the automobile age. Its citizens worship the fishtail Cadillac, use their cars for almost all transportation (there is one car for every 2.6 persons-the nation's highest average), drive up to traffic lights like ballplayers sliding into second, and regard the pedestrian with suspicion and distrust...
Stanley Reed, Kentucky-born, onetime Solicitor General, once a practical dirt fanner, writer of pedestrian opinions, rated as an able lawyer...