Word: riffraff
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Waterfront riffraff and cheap gangsters of all nations, plus open and tawdry vice, are typical of famed Marseille, but so too is the soaring, indomitable spirit of its sunny French citizens. The true Marseillais is bold, humorous, boastful and greathearted. Last week stout, jovial, bearded Louis Frichet, one of the most popular citizens of jostling, neighborly Marseille, became the hero of a holocaust which made news the world around...
...when plump, hard-working Carrie Weaver Smith became its superintendent last year, compared to the Girls' Industrial School at Beloit roughly as a slum kindergarten compares to Bryn Mawr. Inmates of the N.T.S.G. were some 60 members of the U. S. capital's worst young female riffraff. Most were colored, some white. The majority were three-time offenders. Practically all had either syphilis or gonorrhea. The plant was an obsolete brick building, with badly ventilated rooms and few sanitary facilities. On the theory that the deplorable conditions at the N.T.S.G. existed partly because no one knew about them...
...Riffraff," Jean Harlow and Spencer Tracy in the title role, is an expert melodrama of bombs, brains, brute stupidity, strike agitation, and escape from prison. The director makes use of every stock situation known to cinema, from the working girl sweetheart and the caveman boyfriend with neolithic brawn and paleolithic brains, to the sirens and flying bullets that scream after the escaped prisoner. But from beginning to end there is not one single cliche. In addition to this remarkable achievement, the picture tells a passionate love story without one word of love. Spencer Tracy, the tough...
...should not have thought of ourselves. Instead of jumping into the ocean, as most escape heroines do, Jean Harlow crawls with her two companions through a drainage pipe. And when one of them is shot by a guard, she does not murmur with her last breath, "Good luck, Jean." "Riffraff" is worthy of the highest compliment a critic can give; it is not over done...
Maudlinity is the keynote of Riffraff. Its situations come out of a can that was stale long before the first tuna was tinned. And it makes no effort to turn to account the genuine picturesqueness of the San Pedro, Calif, docks, where most of Riffraff was shot. Best scene: the finance company reclaiming the allurements of the Tracy-Harlow home...