Word: tinhorn
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...year, brought in an annual profit of $3,000,000. But in 1934. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia ordered the machines seized, personally banged up dozens of them with a sledge hammer while photographers recorded his prowess. He also called fellow Italian and longtime admirer Frank Costello a bum, a tinhorn gambler, and a punk. That was the end of Tru-Mint and of Costello's regard for the Little Flower...
City is far more honest and unpretentious than most movie preachments on juvenile delinquency. Most of the backgrounds, shot in Brooklyn's swarming slums, give the doings of the tinhorn hoodlums a convincing look of reality. Best atmospheric touches: Peter's grubby home; the grey, frayed hopelessness of his hard-working parents (admirably played by Thelma Ritter and Luis Van Rooten); the dank, underground goings-on in the Dukes' basement club; the bits & pieces of broken-down humanity that cluster like flies around Selma's sidewalk soda stand. Especially good are the close-up studies...
...less sure of what is to come in U.S. writing. Said Robert Penn Warren: "I know that it had better not be the cozy and vulgar version of sweetness-and-light longed for by the friends and relations of Oliver Allston [Elder Critic Van Wyck Brooks] or by complacent tinhorn patrioteers. The times we are heading into shouldn't give much encouragement for that guff except in the lending libraries." Added Dos Passos: "Young writers who believe in themselves should be willing to starve in a garret once more...
Dick Powell, Hollywood's prettiest tough guy, is cast as a tinhorn gambler with a heart of pure gold. As junior partner in a plushy gambling house, he is suspected of the murder of a crooked cop (Jim Bannon) and the cop's girl (Nina Foch). Powell can take some comfort from the fact that his partner's wife (Ellen Drew) and the murdered girl's sister (Evelyn Keyes) are both crazy about him. A tired police inspector, well played by hulking Lee J. Cobb, finally unravels the puzzle. But the story is told with such...
...simple-mindedness of the story is saved once in a while by Steinbeck's incidental touches. His chapters on Alice's solitary jag and on Camille's tired parrying of Louie, a diffident but brutal tinhorn Don Juan, are clever little stories in themselves. He writes with delicacy of the blundering stratagems and satisfactions of an adolescent mechanic called Pimples. But in theme and design the novel is a disappointing piece of second-rate, back-to-the-bulls fiction. Moreover, Steinbeck writes carelessly. Mrs. Pritchard has never known a day's pain on page...