Word: underworlders
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...equipped with police radio, siren and flashing red light, Winchell became a "national institution" with annual earnings of more than $500,000. Trading plugs for the latest dirt, he played the fawning pressagents for all they were worth, banishing the unfavored to his feared "DD [drop dead] list." His underworld contacts occasionally turned up a genuine "skewp." In one instance he announced the slaying of Gangster Vincent ("Mad Dog") Coll six hours before it actually happened. In another, acting as a go-between in the surrender of Murder Inc.'s Louis ("Lepke") Buchalter, he picked up the mobster...
...play the game again. The habits of our minds force us to once again look for the "explanation" for the events we see. In The Birthday Party, one could explain McCann's and Goldberg's actions as a fiendish underworld plot to get Stanley. Here it's just as simple: Ruth must have been a prostitute when Teddy married her (the suggestion is made several times in the play). Perhaps Teddy has brought her to Europe to work out the unresolvable differences between them, has failed in his efforts, and is now willing to let the family solve his problem...
...this ties in poorly with the other parts of the film, which begins as a sort of underworld Taking Off. (Taking Off is another first American film by a Czech director, also concerned with drugs, but in a middle-class milieu.) Unlike Taking Off, Passer's film switches suddenly from slick comedy to terror and sordidness as JJ's companion mistakenly shoots himself up with rat poison intended for JJ and crumples to his death. JJ drags him to an elevator, then flees in fright. The body lies inert across the doorway, the arms flexing up over the chest...
...horror without catching the link between them. Similarly, Schlesinger fuses the diverse cultures of London, as when his middle-class doctor hero encounters a pack of freaked-out roller-skaters careening past his car. Nowhere does Passer even suggest any side of New York other than the dank underworld and the faceless corridors roamed by George Segal--except perhaps at the very end when he walks away on a bright city street and disappears, followed by two brisk, unconcerned city slickers. He and his world have vanished without a trace...
...allows. Retelling the essentials of an actual case of heroin smuggling from France into New York. William Friedkin's film concentrates on the facts and mechanics of narcotics detective work, and the intense, long-term efforts of two cops to trace $32 million in heroin and to pinch the underworld business associates making the transaction...