Word: shiftless
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Lily Sue (because Willard Mack* happened to notice her tall, auburn beauty), later a role in The Noose-now her name in white lights. Arthur Hopkins has cast her opposite Hal Skelly, as a slangy lady of the burlesque wheel, who is unfortunately in love with a no-account, shiftless husband (Hal Skelly), a "comic hoofer" without "a laugh above the hips," without timbre to respond to her affection...
...business and industrial depression again set in, and Dr. Todd's brains averaged 1,540 c.c. He told the dining doctors: "Here were the men who could think for themselves, who knew and resented their fate. The pneumonia of the shiftless, the tuberculosis of the overwearied struggler, the heart disease of the adventurer, no longer acted alone as our receiving agents. Instead, men shot themselves or each other; threw themselves into the lake [Lake Erie]; poisoned themselves with morphine or raisin jack; or perished of cold, listlessly lost in despair." Late in 1922 smaller brains came to the anatomy...
...even lets her have Hope, her daughter (the small hope of Westlake), and puts all the agony on Joe's shoulders, which broaden by bearing it alone. But Kate, from the day she leaves art school to be the first Joe's bride, from that charming but shiftless Joe's early death in Westlake, through long years of pitying herself, loving little Joe, resolving to paint again but never doing it, running everywhere to take small presents and repeat clichés (a whole encyclopedia of them), Kate is forever and ever to blush unseen, to live...
...Huck, as might have been expected, is still shiftless, happy-go-lucky, not very respectable. Always a smooth liar, he took to professional story-telling years ago. Only since respectability went into a decline has he been really successful. On disreputable subjects like night fishing, adultery, peeking in at lighted windows and loafing, he is quite an authority, having had in them a lifelong interest. He can write about them, too, up to a certain incoherent point where the blissful inanity- or is it miracle?-of "just being alive" turns upon itself and leaves his lazy mind groping for words...
...most realistically played. But Nan Marriett Watson as Amy, who comes from Frisco to wed him, runs her gamut of emotions with accuracy and some sweetness. Richard-Whorf, as Joe, the rolling stone, has a peculiarly slow-moving part; it is rather possible that he overdoes his shiftless speech and dawdling walk. But the spectator soon accepts him; and he makes an undeniably handsome swain...