Word: riffraff
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...this really going to be a western that tells it like it was? Will Penny starts out that way. The opening scenes of cowboys working in the Old West depict them as a sordid rabble of exploited riffraff with a uniformly low opinion of themselves. Is the film really going to show that Charlton Heston can act as well as perform? At the start, he is completely convincing as Cowboy Will Penny-illiterate, aging, and anything but bright. He doesn't even have a heart of gold; Gary Cooper would never have left a wounded pal to bleed...
Prison Peerage. It is, in fact, a prison society dominated by the "toughs": hard cases who exact tribute in the form of sex and tobacco from the rank-and-file riffraff. It is intensely snobbish. "Crashers" (burglars) will not talk to pimps. Prestige is based on length of term, and a prison peerage goes to anyone who has served on Devil's Island or Cayenne (the now extinct French penal colonies...
...This time the hecklers got the better of him. Speaking in Gelsenkirchen during the last week of the campaign, Erhard was confronted by a grim-faced chorus of Kumpel (miners) who closed in about the speaker's platform carrying black flags and muttering about impending mine closings. "Shameless riffraff!" snapped Erhard when they booed him. "If it hadn't been for me, these louts and hoot owls would have rotted in their diapers. Never have I seen so much stupidity, impudence and meanness in one heap." It was hardly the way to handle angry workers...
...stage movement works best in small, humorous scenes like the early one of the itching, scratching, sneezing, retching freeloaders in Shen Te's tobacco store, and in the finale when a congregation of riffraff salutes the gods with raised mop as the "illustrious ones" fly away on a winch-raised cloud...
Moderate Tearoom. By sheer weight of numbers as well as dollars, the cavalrymen were hurting An Khe and being hurt by the uncontrolled squalor and rapacity of the riffraff. So just before things boiled over in Tet New Year roistering last January, Air Cav General Harry W. O. Kinnard stepped in and declared all of An Khe off limits to his men. Prices soon dropped back toward normal, the disease rates dipped. But the men of the Air Cav, out fighting in the jungles for weeks at a time in some of the bitterest, bloodiest battling...