Word: bandits
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Whenever the Nationalist Army comes to mop up a place of Communists, it is the Fire Society that points out to the troops which village is a bandit [Communist] hideout ... or who is a bandit and should be killed. In other words, a single word from the Fire Society can turn a whole village to ashes or deprive a peasant of his life...
...Besides the 'official' or constant contributions, there are also extraordinary ones to be paid. . . . 'Constructing fences payment' is a polite term for kidnaping for ransom. If a peasant is unlucky, the Fire Society can easily arrest him on a charge of 'collaborating with bandits.' If he is clever and rich enough to send in some $200,000 CN or $300,000 CN, he becomes a 'repented' good citizen. Otherwise, his charge will change from collaboration to 'being a bandit'-and the sentence is death...
...Sicily there is no bloodier bandit than Salvatore Giuliano. A swart, 25-year-old ex-black marketeer, who began his career with the killing of a customs officer, Salvatore has totted up a spine-chilling record of robbery, blackmail, murder and kidnaping. Yet to many a Sicilian, Giuliano is a hero as revered as Robin Hood. Sicilian police have long since promised not to bother him provided that he kills no policemen. On Palermo's walls, signs calling for "Giuliano for President" are common sights...
Last week Giuliano took a political position: while his band was attacking Communist headquarters in two Sicilian towns, the bandit himself put an advertisement in the newspapers declaring his undying enmity toward the "Red gangsters who want to throw us into the lap of that terrible Russia...
...action sequences in "Carmen" are well done and the continuity--usually hampered when a foreign picture is cut for export--is good. Minor sketches of a fortune-telling gypsy and a one-eyed bandit are among the picture's high-spots, but the high-spots are few. The bitter revenge that motivated Merimee's unhappy soldier, and his fatal attachment for Carmen, are hinted at here but never realistically portrayed, and thus to main thread of the plot is expressed more by subtle implication than by forceful story-telling. But judging from the advertisements, subtle implications are what the public...