Word: spading
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Washington. Once there, he is constantly reminded of his background. Take this exchange with a Connally-type Texan: " 'Now, Gold. Everybody here is a somebody, and I don't know why you're being so captious about who it is you are. He is the Spade, she is the Widow, I am the Governor and you're the - ' 'Doctor!' yelled Gold in time to ward off a crushing repetition of that denunciatory term...
Like a Hollywood morning, Somebody 's Darling gets off to a slow start, but picks up velocity and life (and more than a few deaths) as it moves along. McMurtry tosses off a few good Sam Spade-ish one-liners (an aging producer toasting in the poolside sun is a "ninety-year-old french fry"), and a pair of good-ole-boy screenwriters from Texas provide boisterous comic relief. McMurtry, who knows the Hollywood milieu firsthand, reveals a nice sense of place and trade. The celluloid scene has been done before; what McMurtry gives it-as he gave that...
When Bogart played Sam Spade in Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1941), he saw through the deceptions of Mary Astor, and turned her over to the police. When he played Marlowe in Chandler's The Big Sleep (1946), he got there first, and Eddie Mars walked out the door to be gunned down by his own henchmen. He had control. Elliot Gould as Marlowe has none. Sure, he has the Bogart style--the self-confident, sarcastic attitude towards the police, the crooks, and even the incompetent gunsel who tails him. But he utterly lacks the substance. When...
Alas, the picture does not come off because execution does not match conception. Simon's literary palette is as lacking in delicate hues as Director Moore's visual one. It is bold to plunk Rick's cafe down in Sam Spade's San Francisco. It is even mildly funny to have Victor Laszlo require his wife's old lover to help him get not letters of transit so he can escape the Nazis but a liquor license so he can open a French restaurant in Oakland. But when the song that reminds Rick...
...Harvard, he parked his Model T on the ellipse behind the White House and joined the local Monitor crew. He trod the White House beat while Warren G. Harding entertained Nan Britton in a coat closet, and when tight-lipped Calvin Coolidge gravely turned over a ceremonial spade of earth one Arbor Day and, asked to say a few words, pronounced: "That's a fine fishworm." He called Franklin D. Roosevelt "the greatest President of my time," respected Dwight Eisenhower, was dazzled by John F. Kennedy and never did like Richard Nixon. "If you live long enough, people confuse...