Word: tortillas
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...horse successively in a smithy, a barbershop, a ruined hacienda, a boxcar, a church. In transit, the camera takes the usual tourist shots of cactus, fiestas, religious processions, fireworks, cactus. They are all colorful, but the Technicolor looks as if it were printed on the back of an old tortilla...
John Steinbeck respects the underdog, but he melts uncontrollably before a no-good, boozed-up bum. His sentimental eulogies of riffraff began with his first successful book. Tortilla Flat (1935), continued in Cannery Row (1945), and appear again in Sweet Thursday, which is really a return visit to Cannery Row. It reads like stuff that has been salvaged from the wastebasket. All the characters in Sweet Thursday (who live in Monterey, Calif., Steinbeck's home territory) have a lot in common: rotgut whisky in their bellies, leather in their hides, gold in their hearts and bats in their belfries...
John Steinbeck, now 50, has run a wobbly literary path for nearly a quarter of a century. Signposts along the way read: charming sentimentality (Tortilla Flat), left-wing melodrama (In Dubious Battle), maudlin blather (Of Mice and Men), tender innocence (The Red Pony), honest social indignation (Grapes of Wrath), meretricious sex (The Wayward Bus). His latest novel, East of Eden, comes under none of these labels, although it courts most of them for long stretches...
...type-cast screen career of playing himself-the narrow-eyed, rock-hard underdog. In his first movie, one of his lines came easily: "It stinks." He put a jarring realism into his tough-guy roles -in such movies as They Made Me a Criminal, He Ran All the Way, Tortilla Flat. The critics cheered him, and Hollywood's pinkos took him in tow. Soon, Garfield was lending his name to all sorts of Communist-front crusades...
George Herriman's [famed comic-strip character] Krazy Kat once demonstrated, to an astonished duck, the same hat-making possibilities of the tortilla...