Word: sordidly
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...some specimens of recent history-the Bilbos, Huey Longs, "Pappy" O'Daniels and "Cotton Ed" Smiths. Some are merely time servers and seat warmers who are as incapable of harm as of greatness. There are others whose antics are sometimes cheap and whose motivations are sometimes sordid. But their faults in one area of lawmaking or politicking are offset by their usefulness in others. After allowances are made for such human frailty, these eight would turn up on most lists of the Senate's most expendable...
...Bird Cage (by Arthur Laurents; produced by Walter Fried & Lars Norden-son) is a combination of all the formula tough-guy movies that a lot of people have been staying away from for years. The particular locale of The Bird, Cage is a gaudily sordid nightclub; the particular hard guy is the nightclub's boss. For the rest, Playwright Laurents invents nothing, improves nothing, omits nothing. He has successfully combed the market for a strand of perfectly matched cliches...
...just that Playwright Kanin sets theater above drama, but that he displays an almost equal lack of respect for his sordid material and his own talent. The one concern with squalor is to make it picturesque at all costs; with vulgarity, to exploit it for laughs. In the end The Rat Race gets nowhere; worse, it gets dull, repeating a lot of facile tricks and typifying a theater where, more & more, clever playwrights write everything but plays...
...Paramount) is a lagging, maudlin movie with a tricky plot that never quite gets untangled. A sentimental reporter (Alan Ladd) who finds a pretty corpse in a cheap hotel is moved to track down the people in her fat address book and find out how she came to her sordid end. After Reporter Ladd finally "winds up the case," there are at least two unexplained murders and a heroine whose life story is still pretty much of a mystery. The journalistic technique constantly threatens to make the movie a good study of sleazy big-city life, but the story bogs...
...film has enough seamy passion, sordid heroism, and familiar props (a smoky nightclub like the one in Casablanca, repeated torch-singing of a Tin Pan Alley tune) to make it a caricature of a Bogart film. Wearing his old trench coat and mouthing a cigarette. Bogart returns to Tokyo after the war to start a small freight airline backed by a blank-faced racketeer (oldtime silent Cinemactor Sessue Hayakawa). By the time the comic-book plot has run its course, Bogart has saved his ex-wife (Florence Marly) from exposure as a Tokyo Rose, stopped the infiltration of war criminals...