Word: townes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...secluded, 53-acre estate of one Joseph Barbara, 53, ostensibly a soft-drink bottler, at Apalachin (pronounced Apple-achin') in upstate New York. A state cop stumbled onto it almost by accident: he noticed droves of big black Cadillacs and Imperials pouring into town from all directions, traced them to the place where they converged, and barged in on 60 of the most senior statesmen in U.S. organized crime. On sight of a uniform, the hoods fled through the woods like so many Br'er Rabbits with Br'er Fox hot on their heels...
...Vassar girl. I never went to school a day in my life. I was raised, if you wish to call it that, in vaudeville, going from town to town, playing with musicians, acrobats, dancers, even freaks. Some were nice, some tender, some vicious. Many were genuinely bigtime, and you knew it the moment you were with them. Others were simply small-time human beings-petty, meager-minded, whiny, changing from week to week as we traveled from town to town...
...start of the film is striking. The hero, a young Negro (Harry Belafonte), is trapped by a mine cave-in. Five days later he digs his way back to the surface. "I made it!" he shouts in triumph, but nobody replies. The pit head is deserted. The town is deserted. The highways are deserted as the hero, panic-stricken, goes speeding off toward Manhattan, the nearest big city, in the first car he finds. At the Hudson River he is stopped short. The George Washington Bridge is jammed to the rails with abandoned automobiles, all arrested in a desperate plunge...
...accept the fact. He cannot begin a new world because he cannot forget the old; he cannot let social injustice die with the society that fostered it. At this point the moviemakers introduce a particularly amiable snake into their unedifying Eden. A cultivated white man (Mel Ferrer) wanders into town; and of course he too falls in love with the heroine...
...does. He goes to Princeton, falls in love with a rich girl (Barbara Rush), joins the town's top law firm, and rises rapidly up the shingle toward a partnership. The hitch comes when he realizes that in advancing his worldly status, he has neglected his spiritual state. For a moment there, it looks as if the picture is going to make an honest if not very original point. But before anybody can say Fish House Punch, the script gives the hero a splendid opportunity to save his soul without losing any money...