Word: gangsters
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Help It (20th Century-Fox) marks the debut as a movie star of Jayne Mansfield, who has already achieved a tape measure's worth of fame through publicity stills. The plot is frankly built around the 23-year-old platinum blonde's physical proportions. A gangster who wants to marry Jayne has given an agent six weeks to build her up into a famous singer. The agent protests: "Rome wasn't built in a day." The gangster retorts: "She ain't Rome. She's built...
...rather than useful tools, are merely pretty toys; in general, he is too gaily farcical for Shakespeare's guilty merriment; and often, by smothering the words, he refuses to let Shakespeare speak for himself. Yet, though brightened, his Troilus is not bowdlerized: at the big moments Achilles is gangster enough, and Cressida (well played by lovely Rosemary Harris) enough of a bawd. Guthrie's Troilus is like a very free but very robust translation-a fair exchange if not an exact equivalent...
Somehow, it all results in a happy ending, and on the way there, the reader passes a raffish gallery of secondary characters: the Ivy League gangster, Junie Neidlinger; the Boy Scout Congressman, John Kaffey; the carnival hustler, Chick Samstag (who was so cynical that "the failure of tomorrow's sunrise would not have astonished him"). But Author Norris writes with more love of buildings than of people. Rhapsodies to the 20-story "thing of beauty" created by Jeff Hanes run murmurously through the book, and the Tower, though defaced by the years and its occupants, never becomes as caitiff...
...history-and international pandemonium. (The searchers tried but never could track down one storied shot of young Ernest Hemingway feeding a martini to a poodle in Harry's Bar in Paris.) Somewhat less authentically, but no less evocatively, the movie puts together the story of the speakeasy, the gangster, and the upheaval in manners and morals largely out of clips from such forgotten contemporary films as Hot Money and Follies of Youth...
...alley cats get shot with peas, nobody is offended. Director Jules Dassin has used every effect of camera and angle, and he never slows down the pace. While it's hard to believe that a fire-extinguisher could ever put Mappin & Webb out of commission--as it does--most gangster films aren't wholly believable, anyway. For instance, when the stopped-up bell starts to ring almost inaudibly, why isn't the Arrondissement's gendarmerie roused by closed wire to action? Well, we don't know, or care...