Word: shrewder
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...arrogant professors with tenured status in this obscure academic grove, a family of backwoods sadists who rent their muscles to various malefactors, a parole officer (Susan Clark) whose sexiness doesn't quite fit her job category, a good-ole-boy campus cop (Cameron Mitchell) who is a lot shrewder than he acts. Together they almost manage to create a memorable, if not exactly original portrait of petty pretense and ambition in a small town...
...obliterated. The multiple short erasures were amateurish: a single long erasure would be far more likely to have been interpreted as an accident. Even after making all of the short starts and stops ?apparently listening to a portion, then erasing it, then moving on to another part?a shrewder operator would have activated a final continuous sweep of the tape past the erase head. This might have erased the telltale marks on the tape...
...outlaws in this movie are born of history but made of myth. Jesse James is crazy, a killer by blood and pleasure. Cole Younger, equally deadly, is shrewder, less skittish. Both are bandits who become political heroes, leaders of a gang of irregulars who ride through Missouri warring against the new railroad that is appropriating the farm land...
Mussolini's Millions. Gollin guesses that the wealth of Catholicism round the world totals $70 billion, most of it tied up in real estate. As for the church's headquarters, Gollin's two chapters on Vatican finances depict a much shrewder investment operation than that in the American branch office. In 1929 Mussolini paid the Vatican, which was then virtually broke, $92 million in return for Italy's previous takeover of the Papal States. By 1968, Vatican-employed businessmen, chiefly Bernardino Nogara, a Jewish banker, had parlayed this into a $300 million stake in the Italian...
...Gertrude Stein looms over the cultural landscape of pre-World War I Paris like an old-fashioned radio-squat, massive, dark and droning out an endless stream of words. But if her words were sometimes tedious, her eye was seldom wrong. In fact, no American expatriate was a shrewder judge of Paris' radical new art. The Stein family, which came to be known as les Americains, made a powerful buying unit; it helped keep some of the best young artists in Europe alive. Gertrude's brother Leo (an aesthete of some pretension, some understanding and much enthusiasm) graduated...