Word: rooney
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...novels, Max Collins has a talent for both comix writing and verisimilitude. Aided by Rayner's photo-based drawings, "Road," the book, combines great action with believable atmosphere. Michael O'Sullivan (changed to Sullivan for the movie), a lieutenant to real-life Midwestern crime boss John Looney (re-named Rooney in the film), provides for his wife and two sons as a killer nicknamed The Angel of Death. When O'Sullivan's oldest boy, Michael, witnesses a rub-out, old man Looney and his homicidal son Conner decide to kill the whole family. But Sr. and Jr. O'Sullivan escape...
...time is 1931. The story begins in a medium-size city near Chicago. There Michael Sullivan (Tom Hanks) works as a hit man for mob boss John Rooney (Paul Newman), who has raised him as his son--a man who bewilderingly, entrancingly combines Irish bonhomie with ruthless criminality...
...keeps his murderous secrets from his family, which leads a pious middle-class life. But little boys want to know what their fathers do for a living. So one night his young son (Tyler Hoechlin) sneaks a ride in Daddy's car and witnesses a murder committed by Rooney's natural son Connor (Daniel Craig). Connor does not trust Michael Jr.'s ability to keep a secret, so to ensure silence, he begins wiping out the entire Sullivan family. The survivors, the two Michaels, must now run, to Perdition (where the boy's aunt lives) and from...
...grim situation causes anguish for the elder Rooney. He loves Michael far better than he does his natural son. But blood is thicker than affection; he must support the psychopath. There is deeper anguish for the senior Sullivan. It is not just that his wife and younger boy have been killed; it is that all the codes by which he has lived have been violated. These simple souls are driven by a blind and brutal fate; we know from the outset that they are as doomed as Oedipus...
...reality was more dramatic than even a histrionic Rooney could have made it - or at least played it, while Rodgers was around and his brother-in-law Ben Feiner Jr. was helping to write the movie's screenplay. (Another scenarist, by the way, was Guy Bolton - the book writer 30 years earlier of the Princess Theatre shows that had inspired Rodgers and Hart to try musical comedy.) Just before the opening, Hart had been on one of his suicidal toots, and when he arrived at the theater an exasperated Rodgers forbade him entrance. Two days later, ill with pneumonia...