Word: rakings
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There are weaknesses: the film is episodic and some of the sense of mounting horror at this rake's progress is lost because of this. The ending, Wilder and Brackett's genuflection to Hollywood's age-old formulate of the Happy Ending, is contrived and unbelievable. But Milland'e portrayal of the harrowing frightfulness of hangover, the prissy and cynical male nurse in the alcoholic ward, and numerous minor touches will all hit you where you live...
...over 300 years, Maine's professional clammers have assumed that the only way to dig for clams was with a short rake and a strong back. Last week, they heard differently...
Splitting and redoubling its complications with the speed of a Stakhanovite amoeba, neat and artificial as a nest of concentric Chinese boxes, this hypersymmetrical rake's progress is as stylized in its performance as in its structure. It is more like a puppet show than a flesh & blood comedy, and its dialogue is in dialect as formal as the colloquy of Mandarins. The puppets often strike tableaux which have charm, irony and even beauty, of a kind. But it is a kind so rigid and remote from simple human warmth that honest laughs come few & far between...
...even as coolly efficient Ivy is displacing the nation's other blondes in the minds of her three flying wolves as No. 1 target for tonight, tragedy skulks behind the scenes. The gayest rake of the lot (Robert Cummings, an Army flyer in fact as well as fancy) is doomed to die from one of those mysteriously incurable diseases which in filmdom carry off their perfectly healthy victims with stopwatch accuracy at curtain time. Ivy's inevitable wedding steeps all four principals in a maudlin effusion of unspoken nobility aimed at sending the audience out with a lump...
...three high officers in the Chungking supply service: Major General Liang Lin (former mayor of Changsha), Major General Huang Yao, Colonel Pao Yunfei. Liang was convicted of "stealing military materials and of squeeze and extortion." Huang was convicted of receiving 4,100,000 Chinese dollars ($205,000 official rate) rake-off in purchasing military supplies. Pao had made 1,400,000 Chinese dollars from a building contract. All three were shot...