Word: rat
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Sweet Smell of Success. A whiff of the rat-tat-tattle machinations of a poison-penned Broadway columnist and his hatchetman; with Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis cracking whiplash dialogue (TIME, June...
Sweet Smell of Success (Hecht, Hill and Lancaster; United Artists) is a high-tension jolt into the rat-eat-rat, rat-tat-tattle world of a monstrous Broadway columnist (Burt Lancaster) and his favorite hatchetman (Tony Curtis), a pressagent who has swapped his soul for a mess of items. No self-respecting vulture would be caught in the company of these carrion slingers. Says Curtis the flack of Lancaster the gossipist: "You got him for a friend; you don't need an enemy!" Says Burt to Tony: "I'd hate to take a bite...
...type. The book tells of Lemuel Pitkin, who was born in a "humble dwelling much the worse for wear . . . owing to the straitened circumstances of the little family." Like Candide. Lemuel lives out the advice of a philosopher. His is the creed of Nathan "Shagpoke" Whipple, president of the Rat River National Bank and former President of the U.S. In the course of behaving well, e.g., rescuing girls with rich fathers from bolting horses, Lemuel goes to jail, loses a leg, all his teeth and an eye, is robbed of his savings, and is finally martyred by an assassin...
...Cure. In Ann Arbor, Mich., Mrs. Lucy Wireman, 30, denying that she tried to kill her husband, who was hospitalized with a severe case of arsenic poisoning, admitted to police that she had been spiking his beer with rat poison for four years but only "to cure him of the drinking habit...
...gallantry, in fact, is the false note. Zuckmayer and Käutner have mocked up a marvelous illusion of life in the Nazi ruling circles at the turning point of the war. The scene, as they paint it, is a seething roach nest of military puritans, rat-eyed party fanatics and servile chimney barons, of endless work, nonstop parties, public arrogance, private Angst, Germanic sentiment and rotting will, of spies, lies and a dirty, interminable fight for personal power. And through the scene but somehow above it, like let's-pretend Valkyries, wanders a tribe of strangely ambivalent German...