Word: shiftlessness
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...Davis. He asserted that "this Grand Duke Boris" was coming to the U. S. He wanted Secretary Davis to make sure that the Grand Duke was not likely to become a public charge. Said he; "I believe the department would be justified in ascertaining whether these repudiated, unemployed and shiftless dukes and archdukes are not coming here with the intention of overthrowing our republican form of government in the hope of establishing a monarchy. According to newspaper reports, people clamored and paid admission for the purpose of curtseying and kissing the hand of these pretenders (reference to the recent visit...
THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WANTED ?The vineyards of California, some of the sunshine and some of the bitterness, told by an old Italian peasant, the Frisco waitress he married by mail and a shiftless, handsome farm hand...
...manipulating millions. It i§ therefore most appropriately a picture in which valuable stocks and bonds are bandied about like So many pieces of chewing gum. Arliss embodies a millionaire who takes a lowly clerical job in a rival company's office to uncover a conspiracy, and incidentally reforms his shiftless son and saves him for the daughter of the rival house triumphantly to marry. There is novelty in the situation when this girl adopts a precocious brat and hef nervous brother, to square accounts, adapts Arliss as a father. It is the sort of picture which Americans are supposed...
...Playwright Davis is not good enough to get past the screen Cerberus. Thus the ne'er-do-well of the play, discontented with his frigidly austere environment, is apotheosized in the films into a pretty good boy, much put upon for mocking local narrowness. The shiftless youth who was saved by his mother's hand, reaching out from the grave through a devoted girl, becomes merely a sulky Achilles, not far enough gone to the dogs to require a lifeline...
These plangent protests seem ill considered. It is probable that any parents who are so shiftless as to stand by while their children posture and grimace at the command of bull-throated directors would stand by anyway. In such a case the children would inhabit some top floor garret, subsist on cheese and warmed-over coffee. They would have the questionable advantage of consorting with other gutter children. They would grow up into third-rate mechanics? kitchen or gasoline, according...