Word: taut
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...commissars of the NKVD tried to strip his mind and spirit in more systematic ways. How close they came without actually succeeding makes up the chilling better half of Invitation to Moscow, a book of vivid wartime reminiscences by one of Poland's top lawyers and political men. Taut, spare, sharply observed and recorded, it is the most convincing account yet of that indigenous Soviet phenomenon, the phony confession. Beside it, even Arthur Koestler's brilliant Darkness at Noon bulges a bit at the suppositional seams...
...make statues look like monuments instead of stone dummies, imparted some of his secret to Artis. The Quiet One (inspired by a documentary movie of the same name about childhood maladjustment in Harlem) is a quiet, beautifully compact monument to a Negro boy who sits withdrawn, miserable and taut with life...
...direction of Fred Zinneman comes up to his high mark in The Search and The Men. He neither patronizes his Italian civilians, typecasts his G.I.s nor falsifies his combat scenes, which prove as taut as any fiction footage yet shot about World War II. But the picture gets into trouble after it gets back to the U.S. The hero's psychological troubles and diagnosis fall as patly into place as in a clinical report. When the script attempts to show him growing up emotionally in time for a hopeful ending, the change is so drastically telescoped and hastily motivated...
...spectacle of this society, all the springs of which are taut like the trigger of a weapon that one is about to fire, frightens me to the point of dizziness . . . I see as compensation for the misfortune of being born under this regime only dreams of arrogance and the hope of domination . . . Since I have come to Russia I see the future of Europe in black...
...Enforcer" is the first really good cops-and-robbers picture to arrive in Boston for a long time. Marvin Racken's taut, original story of the apprehension of Killers, Inc.--a Kansas City murder syndicate--insures a better than average show from the start. But it is Director Bretaigne Windust's skillful presentation of detail and his avoidance of customary melodramatics that lifts "The Enforcer" out of the ordinary...