Word: underworld
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Brown Eyes (Paramount) presents a new kind of cinematic criminology and a new Joan Bennett. The criminology revolves around a private detective who found a margin of profits in his employment as a liaison between insurance companies and the underworld, from which the companies were interested in recovering stolen gems to obviate payments to their clients. Morey (Walter Pidgeon) is the private detective of Big Brown Eyes, working with an associate whose crimes include infanticide. The Big Brown Eyes are Eve's (Joan Bennett), who has been transformed from a quiet type into a slangy manicurist whose assured deportment...
...bootlegging that used to net such rich spoils is practically extinct, and perpetual surveillance of the underworld has resulted in exceedingly slim pickings from the labor and gambling rackets, which were expected to be gangsters' gold-mines after Repeal. Consequently there is no motive left for murder and violence other than private vengeance, and even this form of amusement has grown unpopular among Chicago's mobdom owing to the tireless efforts of police authorities...
Last April Mayor Kelly began a campaign against all forms of underworld skullduggery; his determination and that of his subordinates has brought results. This drive has concentrated on illicit gambling dens, alky-cookers' work-shops, and blemishes on the face of society. Swift and inexorable action on the part of the law has taught Chicago criminals the wisdom of following Mr. Kipling's advice, and changing their spots. Faced with the loss of revenue from the bootlegging industry and vigorous destruction of other sources of income, the criminal, it seems, can be suppressed if not completely wiped out. Chicago hitherto...
...alley back of his Minneapolis apartment house at 5:41 o'clock one afternoon last December, Editor Walter Liggett was riddled by five machine-gun slugs. Liggett's weekly tabloid, Mid-West American, had made a business of regularly denouncing the "alliance" between the underworld and Minneapolis and Minnesota officialdom. More recently, he had violently broken with his old political crony, Minnesota's Farmer-Laborite Governor Floyd Bjornstjerne Olson. Editor Liggett's murder, therefore, put Governor Olson in something of a spot, whence he attempted to extricate himself by joining Liggett's widow in asking...
...tells the story of three old bachelors whose moribund routine is upset by the will of their former sweetheart leaving them the care of her offspring who proves to be a very pretty girl and a good one even if she does have some shadowy connections with the underworld. Fundamentally it is one of those things which the playwrighting Spewacks diagnose as "Boy meets Girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl"; wholesome, mild and quite safe. The humor is light and fairly well paced. It's nice quiet reassuring amusement with a mellowness apparently aimed straight at the maiden aunt...