Word: venality
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...present government of South Korea is one of the most brutal, venal and corrupt on Earth...
...this does. The Producers lets an audience know the wild juices that flow when a comedian works--it's like running for your life. "I'm wearing a cardboard belt!" Mostel screams, undoing his pants and inflicting his misery and poverty on all of us with the most venal of ulterior motives, sweating grease and doing the other things a great comedian does...
...entourage of relatives, managers, flacks (Harvey Keitel, Joel Grey, Kevin McCarthy) who are devoted about equally to managing his affairs profitably and to seeing that his egocentric whims do not cut too deeply into those profits. As usual in Altman's films, the minor characters are hilariously venal, conning themselves relentlessly, the better to con the public. The film's best running gag has Geraldine Chaplin as sharpshooting Annie Oakley, sniping closer, ever closer to Frank Butler, her husband, who must hold her targets steady while fighting against growing fear as she keeps testing the limits...
...grimness, there is no real heavy in Yeomen of the Guard--the only out and out villain, the venal relative responsible for sending noble Colonel Fairfax to the Tower on a trumped-up charge of sorcery, never even appears. The plot complications arise instead from the ironic unfolding of two different schemes initiated by the forces of good...
...rich-quick schemes could not have succeeded without the cooperation of venal clinic owners, many of them nonphysicians. The favorite ploy was to disguise the kickbacks as rent; that is, the clinic owners would sublease their office space to the labs-which often did not use it. The more patients the doctor sent to the labs, the more rent he would collect. One lab representative told a disguised investigator: "If the volume goes up ten times, rent could go up ten times." A clinic could collect $1,000 a month by renting a cubbyhole containing only a chair. TIME Correspondent...