Word: broken-down
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...less masterful is Lee Marvin's raw but incisive portrayal of a broken-down ballplayer who compresses his whole wretched life into a drunken, sobbing outburst about his inability to hit a curve ball on the outside corner. His table partner is an aging, embittered divorcee (Vivien Leigh), who reacts with exquisite distaste to a recital of his gastric misadventures in Mexico. Many scenes later, in a fit of sexual combustion, she beats Marvin nearly insensible with the heel of her gilded slipper...
...Level XI (605 B.C.), Makor was a broken-down little village where the only excitement was an occasional romp with the sacred prostitutes of Astarte -until the Babylonians came. Corner, a self-righteous scold who must have seen proof sheets from the Book of Jeremiah, prophesied the fall of the city, the Babylonian captivity, and destruction of the conquerors...
...conductor's baton is the original magic wand. Give it to a broken-down piano player and presto!-up pops a shaggy-haired genius, a leader of men, God's gift to music...
...later stories offer a world of manners and mores that in its self-contained coherence suggests the world of Henry James. O'Hara has an idiomatic acquaintance with far more people on far more different levels of society than James ever did-chauffeurs, part-time ladies' maids, broken-down movie directors, cops, smalltown bankers, and so on. But like James, he is a snob and a firm believer that a man's life can best be mirrored in social surfaces. James's rich Americans are dazzled by Europe but never really escape America; O'Hara...
Soon Scandalous John and Paco, mounted on two broken-down nags, are relentlessly driving Old Blue up the Chisum Trail toward the distant stock yards. For weeks through sun, sand and storm, they plod onward, encountering temptation and incomprehension. Nearly everybody along the way tries to persuade John to desist. As for the neatly laid-out fences that block their path, he blithely cuts them. "If you want to get some place in this world," he says, "you've got to cut fence now and again . . . The extent of a man's fences is the extent...