Word: shrewder
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Oscar Hubbard (Carl Benton Reid) is mean, tightlipped, greedy; his brother Ben (Charles Dingle) shrewder, more capable, more sardonic; their sister Regina (Tallulah Bankhead) grandly and coldly ambitious for wealth, power, position. The trio's business schemes require the financial help of Regina's dying husband; and, sick of their vulpine methods, he refuses it. Out of this deadlock springs powerful drama of intramural conspiring and double-crossing, theft and virtual murder...
Unlike his far shrewder halfbrother, the late Sir Austen Chamberlain, a skilled diplomat and linguist, Mr. Chamberlain is singularly unequipped for his "personal" chats with the leaders of other nations. During his November visit to Paris he disappointed French radio listeners by saying "I can speak no French." Last week he showed that he had at least learned something. Saying farewell to M. Daladier he beamed: "Merci, thank you, Merci, monsieur, beaucoup, beaucoup, beaucoup...
...Shrewder with his sound effects this time, Poet MacLeish has added to his impelling verse imperative noises. A woman sings a scale and the scale is parodied by the warning siren, the whine of the raiding planes. It is echoed in a boy's voice calling, is converted into an agonized scream to end the play. Oddity of Air Raid is that, in spite of the fact that the situation is a straight projection of last month's Czechoslovakian crisis, when a man listened for war at his loudspeaker like a frightened bellboy at a murderer...
...polled 48,000 votes in Massachusetts' Republican primary for Governor, although he did not have the official Townsend accolade. Nor was his deal with Candidate Saltonstall the brainchild, as many observers guessed, of shrewd young Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. It was engineered by an opportunist even shrewder: William Henry McMasters...
...when a major-league racketeer is tough enough to survive the bullets of his confreres and shrewd enough to evade the police, there is one pitfall left for him: the income-tax laws. Of all the known criminals currently at large in the U. S., none is tougher or shrewder than roly-poly, button-eyed little Johnny Torrio, whose chin was almost shot away in Chicago in 1925, whose skill in evading the police goes back to before 1920 when he belonged to Brooklyn's famed Five Points Gang. Last week, in New York City, a Federal grand jury...