Word: thugging
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...beak-nosed master sleuth, onetime head of Scotland Yard's famed C.I.D. (Criminal Investigation Department), who solved many of Britain's most famous crimes during his long (1887-1929) service; in London. No theorizing Hercule Poirot, Wensley served a rough & tumble apprenticeship in London's thug-infested East End during the Jack the Ripper era, wrote about it all in Forty Years of Scotland Yard...
Director John Farrow not only helped to write a pretty lively script, but managed to keep his highly volatile star and story under control. Also doing double duty is Songwriter Frank Loesser who, besides contributing a nice burlesque of a marcelled thug named Hair-Do Lempke, composed the songs which Betty sandwiches in between her Keystone clowning...
...hurtling tabloid tradition of the gangster movies of the '30s, but its matter-of-fact violence is a new, postwar style. Brilliantly directed by Raoul (Roaring Twenties) Walsh, an old master of cinema hoodlumism, it returns a more subtle James Cagney to the kind of thug role that made him famous...
Criss Cross is further brightened by some excellent supporting performances. The best are Stephen McNally's detective, Dan Duryea as a sarcastic thug who seems to have more common sense than anyone else in the cast, and Tom Pedi as a fat, greedy hoodlum who bubbles "That's the ticket, that's the ticket," while the mob is planning some program of frightfulness against honest citizens. As the criss-crossed lovers, Lancaster and De Carlo steadily plug the reliable old theme of all-for-love-and-the-world-well-lost. Audiences are not very likely...
...that it shows how producers of "B" pictures have jumped on the "hate-Russia" bandwagon. Instead of cattle rustlers or foreign baddies of obscure allegiance, this touching and horrible little epic of the far north has a real live Soviet Union as the agent of evil. One Russian thug is even made up to look just like Stalin, to clear up any doubts the audience might have...