Word: spiv
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...discovers he is no good at it. His only true emotion is self-pity; his agony is that he must endure all the chic, swinging, semihighbrow parties before one of the nubile feathery birds will sing for him. A brisk, no-nonsense sort of novelist, Glanville catches wonderfully the spiv tone of conversation in swinging London. As a study in frustration, The Artist Type succeeds in making the reader sad for the hero, but not nearly so sad as the hero is for himself...
...from his point of view. In every town he knows the jails, the madhouses, the cantinas and the churches. He wears rags sewn with tiny bells, each of which tinkles a note that in his mind symbolizes the special vice of each place he has visited. He is a spiv, and his roguish capacity for survival unites him with Ulysses, Tom Jones and Huckleberry Finn. Yet Pito remains the faithful son of both Catholicism and the anticlerical tenets of the Mexican Revolution. At his most sacrilegious, he testifies to the faith; at his antisocial worst, he demonstrates that the republic...
...asphalt-jungle cats, they live in "the land of no holds barred"-a grey, womanless room in a grey, womanless house. The father (Paul Rogers) is a bull walrus spuming through yellowed tusks against the dying of his authority. The older brother, Lenny (Ian Holm), is a dapper spiv of a pimp with a lively, corrupt intelligence. Joey (Terence Rigby), the younger, is a dub of a prizefighter, a would-be champion with a chimpanzee brain...
Unhappily, the film too often has that very effect on the onlooker. True, Michael Caine (The Ipcress File) plays the sodding little spiv with a raucous charm that makes Alfie seem more interesting than he actually is. And it is also true that the script struggles loyally to endow Alfie with humor and humanity. After the friend's wife undergoes an abortion-a scene that takes place off-camera but was only with reluctance approved by the Valenti office-Alfie stares in horror at the unseen fetus of his unborn son. The audience is clearly expected to conclude that...
Meanwhile, the British enact high military farce; the war has lost its point, and the rear echelon is a jungle of red tape and "bumf" in which the conniver, the spiv and the apple polisher win the pips, the crowns and the privilege. Ennis is fatally handicapped-and funny-not because he is himself farcical but because he is serious-about love, about music, and about the postwar world. Gallantly, he survives each pratfall (even when ordered to take a class in elementary shorthand when he should have been waving his long hands over an orchestra sawing...