Word: shrewdness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...film opens as the first of a series of corrupt judges is murdered in a small city. More judges are murdered in nearby towns and Inspector Rogas, a shrewd and tough police detective (played by Lino Ventura) is called in on the case to try to put together the pieces of the puzzle. At first Rogas suspects a wrongly convicted pharmacist seeking revenge on his accusers. A boyhood friend of Rogas who is now a writer for a Communist newspaper suggests that conspiratorial political machinations might be involved in the murders, but Rogas dismisses the idea...
...Hispanic objects-Mayan stelae, Aztec jewelry, Incan pottery, Olmec figurines-are smuggled out of Mexico, Central America and the Andean nations of South America. The illicit trade easily reaches millions of dollars annually and involves characters so bizarre they might have stepped out of an old Humphrey Bogart film: shrewd peasants, soldiers of fortune, venal archaeologists, dealers, diplomats and collectors who are ready to pay-or do-almost anything to satisfy their greed...
...practically anything else at which she could try her diamond-decorated hand. Charged with stealing jewels taken out on approval from Cartier, Kitty, 39, was acquitted by a jury after her defense lawyer scored a decisive point: given her notoriety as a compulsive gambler, who could believe that a shrewd firm like Cartier would let her walk away with two rings and a diamond worth...
...best little whorehouse in Texas," and celebrated under that title in a current Broadway musical hit, the Chicken Ranch did a brisk business until a Houston television station broadcast an "exposé" about it five years ago. That shamed the state authorities into shutting it down. Last September a shrewd lawyer moved the Chicken Ranch, virtually intact, to Dallas, where it became a sort of disco restaurant serving Spanish chicken, Mexican chicken, Swiss chicken and so on. Unfortunately for him, the Chicken Ranch's customers were not really interested in those dishes, and four months later the place closed...
...main ingredients, Neil Simon has boldly blended The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, adding some finely chopped bits from The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not. He was shrewd enough to realize that it was not the story lines of his sources that gave them their hold on our affections. Bogart's incisive, ironic characterization of the urban loner, the Hemingwayish dialogue and the film noir look that gave Warner Bros, films their unique quality in the '40s, the forcefulness of the studio's stable of character actors-all of these elements combined to create...