Word: thugs
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...Mike Hammer novels (the first, I, the Jury, was published that year), so they explode on the screen in Railroaded! In Mann movies, the broken bottle, not the gun, is the favored weapon of menace, perhaps because it's more sickeningly intimate. John Ireland, the film's primary thug, breaks a bottle and comes after Joe. Raymond Burr, Mann's inspired (and quite literal) notion of a heavy, had used one in Desperate, and he does it again in Railroaded!, breaking a bottle over...
...Mike Hammer was not your typical gumshoe - at least, not when he made his debut, in I, the Jury, in 1947. A hero with thug tendencies, or a sociopath who fancied himself a hero, Hammer beat up people who got in his way, consistently misled his protector on the police force and, rather than turn the murderer over to the authorities, killed first and asked questions never. He was the bane of civilized society, in books that described his trespasses in lurid detail and shocked nearly as many millions as savored them...
...Hammer picks up a man's beloved old Caruso record and snaps it in two. (The same year I'd seen Blackboard Jungle, where the vicious high-school punks smash a teacher's Bix Beiderbecke records. So I knew Mike was a bad guy.) The music plays up his thug character as well. When Mike shows up in a doorway, we hear the clanging chords that usually greet the first appearance of a monster. This isn't a private eye film; it's a Hammer horror movie...
...could have predicted he would play such a pivotal role. He spent his youth as a street thug in the dusty town of Zarqa before finding his life's purpose in the terrorist camps of Afghanistan. After returning to Jordan he was arrested for possessing explosives and spent five years in prison, where he memorized the Koran and drafted cellmates to join his quest to overthrow Jordan's secular rulers. "Either you were with them or you were an enemy," a former prison mate told TIME in 2004. "There was no gray area." Al-Zarqawi drifted back to Afghanistan...
...they've done it valiantly," said Kerry, Bush's opponent in the 2004 presidential election. "It's time to work with the new Iraqi government to bring our combat troops home by the end of this year." Kerry told TIME, "Our troops did an incredible job killing this thug...