Word: underworld
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1920-1929
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Revelations of intimacy between Philadelphia's underworld and its police force (TIME, Oct. 8) seemed to demand some official decapitations. Several police officers, obviously guilty, were removed, disgraced. Senator-suspect Vare, boss of the city, announced that the Director of Public Safety, Harry C. Davis, his friend for 40 years, was above it all, irreproachable. The grand jury hoped and trusted this was so, but continued its inquiry. Things were looking up for Director Davis. Nevertheless, one day last week, Mayor Harry Arista Mackey bustled into the mayoral office and, without pausing to remove his overcoat, dictated a letter...
Wrote the next day famed Editor & Cinema Critic Mario Carli in Rome's Impero: "Perhaps past conditions approached those shown . . . but in Mussolini's Italy certainly nothing of that nature exists. Gypsies, underworld characters, prostitution, cheating, misery, vice, overdressed peasants, gamin life, people in rags, filthiness, superstition, thuggery, human landscapes immersed in endless fog-even the classic sun of Italy was obliterated by the Fox directors. Can you imagine an Italian seascape perpetually steeped...
...Squealer. Among the more spirited of Manhattan's antiquarians is Mark Linder; he wrote a play from which lamed Mae West evolved the picturesque excitement of Diamond Lil; now he has scratched up further blood and thunder about San Francisco's underworld, 22 years ago. It is a candid melodrama, of vice rampant and virtue triumphant; yet its most bitter climaxes are meant to be accepted and enjoyed in a somewhat mocking spirit. The audience will gloat, not shiver, when a character says: "I'll get you for this, Logan, if it takes me twenty years...
...Woman Disputed. In its first scenes this picture gave promise of becoming one of those compact, dreary dramas of the European underworld that have been done so effectively by UFA and Sovkino. Instead, the drama of its one genuine situation-a harlot (Norma Talmadge) suspected of the murder of a suicide-is ignored in favor of a series of patently unreal and cinematic developments in which the lady, reformed, is called upon to perform for the sake of her country an act which patriotism unconvincingly transforms from a two-rouble incident to a Holy Sacrifice...
While the City Sleeps. Because Underworld, crook cinema written by Ben Hecht, made record returns for Paramount a few months ago, hundreds of hideaways, spitting gats, Big Boys, molls, bulls, rods, and mobs have been photographed. Now Lon Chaney as a very plainclothes detective with bunions strides painfully through a convincing picture about bad men and a good girl...