Word: villains
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Reliance). The inability of Hollywood producers to deal with contemporary political and social problems is only less painfully exhibited by their customary reluctance to try it than by their timid stupidity when they do. In Red Salute, Producer Edward Small was patently under the impression that, by making the villain of the piece a campus radical, he was hurling an intellectual bombshell of some sort at the U. S. cinema public. The picture's release at the Rivoli Theatre in Manhattan last week actually caused a disturbance at which 18 adolescents were arrested for wagging idiotic handbills...
History seldom offers, in its tragedies, so clear-cut a role for the villain of the piece as is now occupied by Mussolini. On his shoulders alone must fall the blame for the misery that awaits Italy, and for the subsequent misery in Europe. Yet he has been quite consistent. Time and again since his advent to power, he has preached militarism to his people. We westerners dismissed these warlike utterances as mere sabre-rattling for mass consumption. We will soon pay for refusing to face the facts...
...break he engineered was really a trick to gain the confidence of the leader (Joseph Calleia) of the Purple Gang, who escaped at the same time. From that point on, the story follows the accepted G-Man course: a hunt, punctuated by machine-gun fire and climaxed by the villain's death, this time in a theatre. It even includes two other familiar episodes culled from the Dillinger saga, the siege in a roadhouse and plastic surgery for purposes of disguise. These details. however, for cinemaddicts who find the current school of underworld melodrama the most exciting furnished...
...potman last week found in the pub cellar the sort of thing that used to occur on the nearby stage half a century ago. Some villain had struck down a middleaged, grey-haired man, rolled him up in curtains, then in linoleum, finally in carpets and tied the big bundle with a rope. When Sir Bernard Spilsbury arrived the usual London headlines suggested that not even this murder trail could be too cold for his keen, Sherlocking nose. Sniffed he: "I should say this man was killed about 1885 and was at that time about 55 years old. There...
...imagine Anthony Abbott, S.S. Van Dine, Carolyn Wells et al enjoying acute cases of indigestion when they see what Mr. Irwin has done with their favorite little tricks. The astute reporter, amateur detective par excellence, successfully makes a dummy out of Sergeant Kellius of the Rome police. The villain becomes the hero, the hero becomes the villain, the love affair is consummated prettily, in fact the ardent detective story reader, if he choose to take this seriously, can find no faults with the orthodoxy of the technique. But the reader who thumbs the pages from a previously experienced appreciation...