Word: underworlders
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...growing rapidly. Last week police in Manhattan were busy wrapping up a gang that had defrauded Diners Club of at least $350,000. The gang, which had Mafia links, had stolen hundreds of blank Diners Club cards, impressed legitimate cardholders' names on them, and sold them to various underworld figures complete with such forged subsidiary identification as driver's licenses.* Gang members then traveled, ate, and charged lavishly, using the cards. Even when they are not liable, issuing companies almost always assume the financial burden of such fraud to maintain good relations with stores, hotels and restaurants...
Running two hours and 40 minutes, The Comedians has everything but economy, and Director Peter Glenville has tarried with a story that might have been twice as good at half the length. Unlike the novel, in which Greene's obsessive concern with man kind's spiritual underworld is subdued, his scenario seems as overtly moralistic as a passion play...
Enter Laurence Senelick as Reb Azrielke. For the remaining two acts he commands the stage, judging the rightness of the dybbuk's claims, then bringing the powers of the underworld against him. Senelick is by turns pitious and imperious, awful in the robes of his rabbinical office, then faint in the arms of a friend. His lines are difficult, full of the persistent legalisms that could have reduced tragedy to laughable pontification. Set against the virtuosity of his performance is the disembodied voice of the dybbuk, sounding all the more despairing and alone in its electronic chill. There, away from...
There are other fears, too, perhaps less rational. The University, at least one dean believes, could be completely overrun by drugs. Everyone would be using them. Everyone would be stoned all the time, floating around with no responsibilities and no obligations. Or the gangster underworld (which is commonly thought to be the source of most marijuana) could gain a foothold in the University through student (and perhaps faculty) pushers. All these fears are very real to the men who make the rules and enforce them here...
...gets chased off the streets by the very people he is trying to help. All three become ruinously involved with a right-wing tycoon who controls several top city officials and now wants to lead a cryptofascist "moral" crusade. Stone's theme is the inextricable grip of the underworld on its inhabitants; he draws a sure-handed diagram of brutal power and its victims...