Word: broken-down
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...tinhorn hoodlums a convincing look of reality. Best atmospheric touches: Peter's grubby home; the grey, frayed hopelessness of his hard-working parents (admirably played by Thelma Ritter and Luis Van Rooten); the dank, underground goings-on in the Dukes' basement club; the bits & pieces of broken-down humanity that cluster like flies around Selma's sidewalk soda stand. Especially good are the close-up studies of gratuitous violence: in the poolroom the Dukes brutally beat up a couple of outsiders; in the school manual training class the kids (armed with the crude guns they have been...
...dilemma are beautifully embodied (but hardly acted) by Ava Gardner, wife of a derelict U.S. flyer (John Hodiak). When not hung over from bad rum and alleged combat fatigue, Hodiak is busy smuggling airplane engines to Central America with the help of a suave mastermind (Vincent Price) and a broken-down fingerman (Charles Laughton). Fed-Man Taylor finally convinces himself, with some hard-breathing monologuing, that Ava is innocent but deeply implicated. So why not sell out on his job and collect on his love-as well as on Laughton's $12,000 in hush money...
Bill Murphy is no part of the newspaper tradition that copyreaders are just broken-down reporters. A Yaleman ('17) and onetime Wall Street bond salesman, he left Manhattan to work on the News-owned Detroit Mirror. When Patterson torpedoed it without notice in 1932, Murphy went back to the News to stay...
...freight overflows the docks, the warehouses, runs out into the streets and public parks. Alongside the Pargue Infantil are stacked weather-beaten wood cases containing tractors, electrical transformers, construction steel, concrete mixers. Up past the cathedral on the road to Cali stands a broken-down road grader, tires deflated, blue-flowered vines curling around its steering wheel...
...tidy, tree-studded campus of Alabama's Tuskegee Institute this week, Negroes and whites (including Alabama's governor) will honor a onetime slave who was once traded by his master for a broken-down race horse. Shy, shuffling George Washington Carver, who died in 1943, had spent a lifetime performing scientific miracles. In his tiny laboratory, which he equipped from a rubbish heap on the campus, he had created hundreds of industrial products out of the common stuff-clay, peanuts, potatoes-he found about...