Word: gangsters
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...their time, the Shelton gang had been responsible for scores of violent deaths. They were whiskey runners, saloon keepers and slot-machine operators. They fought the Ku Klux Klan, fought the law, bought up sheriffs. But mostly they battled a tough, boastful gangster named Charley Birger...
...Author. "Today," wrote Graham Greene shortly before World War II, "our world seems particularly susceptible to brutality. There is a touch of nostalgia in the pleasure we take in gangster novels, in characters who have so agreeably simplified their emotions that they have begun living again at a level below the cerebral. We, like Wordsworth, are living after a war and a revolution, and those half-castes fighting with bombs between the cliffs of skyscrapers seem more likely than we to be aware of Proteus rising from the sea. It is not, of course, that one wishes to stay forever...
...Gangster films, the Municipal Council decreed last week, could no longer be shown in Kuala Lumpur, the Malay capital. The Malaya sector of the Communist campaign for Southeast Asia was heating up so rapidly that the Kuala Lumpur city fathers decided that they had best call a halt on Hollywood terror...
...recovered his courage. McCloud (Humphrey Bogart), a veteran of World War II, comes to one of the Florida keys to see the widow (Lauren Bacall) and hotelkeeper father (Lionel Barrymore) of his best friend, who died in battle. He finds them the virtual prisoners of a gangster named Rocco (Edward G. Robinson), his gunmen (Thomas Gomez, Harry Lewis, Dan Seymour) and his wretched mistress (Claire Trevor). These interlopers are living ghosts of the 1920s, slipping back into the U.S. from Cuba. Barring the pathetic-mistress, who is half drowned in liquor, they are mortally dangerous people...
...other words we are headed for the same kind of world we had before, even down to the gang lords . . . There is great talk of the good old days and prohibition; in other words, return to the old order . . . I tried to make all the characters old-fashioned (the gangster's moll is out of the '20s), to brand them as familiar figures, and to suggest they were ready to take over again...