Word: swindler
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...hundreds of marks, including horseplayers who fell for his phony wiretap schemes for beating the odds, lovers of exotic pets who bought his talking dogs only to learn that they had been "stricken" with laryngitis, and one detective who was finessed into buying $30,000 in "stock" from convicted Swindler Weil while escorting him to prison. The secret of his success? "Each of my victims had larceny in his heart," explained the master of hanky-panky...
Stavisky. More beautiful than Barry Lyndon considerably shorter. Thirties tale of a high-living swindler, with nice Trotsky bits thrown...
...McHugh used every ploy to scoop competitors: posing as a coroner to get privileged information, hiding behind police sergeants' desks and answering their phones. Though he reported some 700 murders, McHugh's greatest coup came in 1952 when he filed a series of interviews with an escaped swindler before persuading him to surrender to FBI officials in Milwaukee. ∙ Died. Ernst Alexanderson, 97, prolific inventor of over 320 electrical devices; in Schenectady, N.Y. Using a high-frequency alternator he developed at General Electric Co. labs, Alexanderson in 1906 made his first continuous-wave broadcast from a radio station...
...sincerely want to be rich?" he was playing the game according to these rules; William Make peace Thackeray knew that "the facade is everything" when he told Victorian England "How to live well on nothing a year" in Vanity Fair. Alain Resnais's Stavisky, based on a real swindler who flourished in mid-30's Paris, is a man who understands this first principle of high class fraud, but the film derives most of its interest not from the ethics or mechanics of chicanery but from its recreation of the rogue's paradise of inter war Europe. To a certain...
Stavisky himself (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a two-bit swindler blown up to a Hindenburg of a con man, manipulating fake international corporations and floating fake bond issues. Stavisky thinks he's left his old world of petty fraud behind, and Resnais seems to agree with him, emphasizing the discontinuity between the pickpocket and the cosmopolitan "financier." Stavisky affects history in a way a pickpocket cannot, Resnais maintains; I'affaire Stavisky, when it's blasted out of the water, shakes the Popular Front Government of Leon Blum and forces the deportation of Leon Trotsky, who until then had enjoyed political...