Word: thugs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...proper cunning and just the right kind of careful menace and restrained violence. He is not like a Graham Greene operative, haunted by guilt, shrouded in original sin. John Le Carre's world of moral acrostics would be alien to him. Lancaster plays a thug, an opportunist for whom commitment is solely a matter of expediency. But the movie does not give him much scope to develop any of this. Sometimes, standing on a dark street in Vienna while waiting for a contact, he looks uncertain and lost...
There is a scene in Shoot the Piano Player: Two thugs have kidnapped the hero's son. They have him in a car, and are called upon to entertain him. One thug claims to have a valuable possession. To back up the claim he say, "If this is not true, may my mother drop dead on the spot." Cut to the mother, dropping dead on the spot. This is early Truffaut, mixing genres eagerly, producing a film steeped in two classically American traditions -- slapstick and gangsters, with a third, sentiment mixed with melancholy that is curiously...
...chief thug and extortionist for the late François ("Papa Doc") Duvalier, Luckner Cambronne used to be the second most feared man in Haiti. After Papa Doc's death in April last year, Cambronne appeared to be on the verge of becoming No. 1. Though Jean-Claude ("Baby Doc") Duvalier, 21, succeeded his father as President for Life, it sometimes seemed in the early stages of his rule that the cunning Cambronne was actually pulling the strings of power. But last week Cambronne was headed into exile, a puppeteer apparently cut adrift by his puppet...
They are all based on real people, at any rate. Mrs. Earbore, the Tasteful Lady, is a takeoff on the country-club women of Grosse Pointe, Mich., whom Tomlin observed while she was growing up in Detroit. Edith Ann, the 5½-year-old thug-Tomlin's best known routine after Ernestine-derives from a little girl she met in a Pasadena hotel. "I wanted to do a child," she says, "and I'd probably thought about Edith Ann for years without being conscious of it. I had some trouble making her scruffy; the Laugh-In producers wanted...
Clockwork Orange. John Alcott's colors are impressive, but Stanley Kubrick's film of the Anthony Burgess novel has the tone of a shrill scold, and is a visual and dramatic cheat. Malcolm McDowell as the lead thug has been praised for his performance, but can't help being more interesting than his supporting cartoon figures. No great achievement for director or actor...