Word: underworld
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...emotional experience. Director John Cromwell has succeeded in maintaining throughout a high level of tension which occasionally breaks out in explosive dramatic shocks. The mood, even in its happy moments one of ominous fatalism, is set by Charles Boyer with his gloomy portrayal of Pepe le Moko, the underworld ruler. Hedy Lamarr, whose haunting mystery is the answer to an unexpressed desire in every man's subconscious, also stands with Mr. Boyer the test of the long, electric close-ups. The picture is notable for its attention to those details which aid in heightening the effect:--the irony...
Behind Racketeer Flegenheimer, who was murdered in a Newark saloon, Mr. Dewey soon nosed out a notorious underworld lawyer, Julius Richard ("Dixie") Davis. When relentless Tom Dewey announced that lurking behind Davis was the substantial figure of potent Tammany District Leader Jimmy Hines, whom he indicted as the policy racket's real boss (TIME, June 6), he made a real stir in city politics...
Till his 65th year, Philadelphia Author John T. McIntyre wrote gimcrack historical novels and Broadway melodramas. Then he staked a claim on Philadelphia's underworld and immediately struck pay dirt. The minor crooks, racketeers, pickpockets, cardsharps, pimps, stools, finks of Steps Going Down (1936) and Ferment (1937) were as tough as shoe leather, as American as a tabloid. In Signing Off, however, Author McIntyre's claim begins to look as if it were rapidly being worked...
Signing Off's underworld heroes, case-hardened but paunchy, resemble the sporting characters of Damon Runyan. wry, picturesque, sentimental. Author McIntyre's technique is to interrupt fits & starts of tough talk with fits & starts of windy anxiety over (in this case) the Roman Catholic Church...
...Paramount). Underworld melodrama, based on a story by Norman Krasna, directed by Fritz Lang, scored by Kurt Weill, acted by Sylvia Sidney and George Raft which, setting out to prove that Crime Does Not Pay, proves instead that the brightest names in Hollywood sometimes make its dullest pictures...