Word: squalidity
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Such pulpy reel-romance recalls the tenement symphonies of the '30s-working-class misery in a minor key. Going from bad to worse, one long scene is awkwardly underscored by a title song, Hollywood's most lamentable habit these days. And the squalid abortion episode is mere nonsense. A moral issue is raised, then sidestepped by presenting a slovenly midwife who totes a flashlight and performs her dark deeds on the floor of a vacant flat. This of course makes abortion conveniently unthinkable...
...poles are tall as trees and much neater; its only enemies are unenlightened woodpeckers, public service commissions, and the parents of teenagers. How satirize such perfection? Pearson does his best by suggesting that company executives are only human when trapped behind filing cabinets with neurotic secretaries, but this is squalid stuff. (How little adultery there was in Shakespeare...
Back-Scratching. Born in the squalid red-light district of Mexico City to a French immigrant father and a Mexican mother, Trouyet began as an office boy in a bank. He made his way up through stock brokerage with a knack for winning important friends. Making himself useful to other like-minded coyotes-including Banker Anibal de Iturbide and Insurance King Manuel Senderos-Trouyet cut them in on his deals, in turn was let in on theirs. Last year he persuaded Textile Tycoon Je-ronimo Arango Sr. to join him in buying a 55% stake in the big old Orizaba...
...Pans, with their mushroom haircuts and high white shirt collars, and onstage they clown around endlessly-twisting, cracking jokes, gently laughing at the riotous response they get from their audience. The precise nature of their charm remains mysterious even to their manager. "I dropped in at a smoky, smelly, squalid cellar," he says of the day he discovered them, "and there were these four youths. Their act was ragged, their clothes were a mess. And yet I sensed at once that there was something here...
...Downing has never been anyone's dream house. Jerry-built half a century earlier as a private residence by a Harvard-educated speculator, Sir George Downing, the Whitehall relic, four stories high, so depressed Melbourne that he refused to set foot in it. Haughty Margot Asquith called it "squalid," Lloyd George's wife would not move in until adequate plumbing was installed. During the blitz, Churchill complained that it was "shaky." One ancient boiler heated both Nos. 10 and 11, residence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, leading then-Chancellor Rab Butler to complain that when Churchill...