Word: derelictions
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...years ago, with such figures as Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passes and the early Farrell in the crew, young novelists rushed to sign on the happy ship. But in the hands of those who seem to think of life as just another four-letter word, it becomes a drifting derelict...
What lifts Tight Little Island above its own high mark of insular drollery, and turns its chuckles into laughs, is its mastery of the visual gag. The picture moves quietly but surely until the islanders make a rendezvous with the derelict Scotch. Then, in picturing their celebration, their efforts to hide the loot from customs raiders and a chase to rescue the biggest cache of whisky, the camera goes on an inspired spree. For lightness, comic movement and inventive detail, these sequences are worthy of Rene Clair...
...prize fighters with big-time dreams, and the racketeers who make & break them. Into normal screening time, it crams 80 climactic minutes of the career of Heavyweight "Stoker" Thompson (Robert Ryan). At 35, Stoker needs only a couple of stiff jolts to the head to become a punch-drunk derelict. Unwittingly, he saves himself by refusing to throw a fight. When local racketeers have finished teaching him a lesson, Stoker's right fist is a broken mess and his fight career is ended once & for all. To his wife (Audrey Totter), it is a happy ending...
...then. Gotfred, son of a Marxist day laborer, had traveled far & wide as a sailor, tramp printer and roustabout. In 1931 he went to Moscow. He returned to Norway after that, but during the war, when the mines and homes of Kirkenes were demolished and villagers huddled together in derelict mineshafts, Hoelvold was back in Russia as a Norwegian-language news commentator on the radio. By the time he came back to Kirkenes in 1945, Russia's peace treaty with Finland had wiped out a whole section of Finnish-Norwegian border and Russia was Kirkenes' next-door neighbor...
...Bribe, dame and 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...