Word: taut
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Follow Me Down, by Shelby Foote. How a God-fearing Mississippi farmer is seized by temptation and driven to murder; a taut little novel of crime & passion (TIME, July...
...This taut little novel takes a sharp look at one of the oldest problems in literature: the origins and consequences of a crime of passion. Like Theodore Dreiser in An American Tragedy, though on a far more modest scale, Novelist Foote has tried to find out and explain why a peaceable, inoffensive man can sometimes be driven to murder. He has set his story in his native Mississippi among the poor-white farmers and the small-town characters he intimately knows...
Even with its shortcomings, the picture succeeds to a remarkable extent in understanding its criminals, and creating a kind of perverse sympathy for them without condoning their crimes. To have accomplished that within a story which is also a taut and exciting thriller, lifts The Asphalt Jungle high above the run of melodramas that do not score half so well on targets much easier...
During most of World War II, Boone ran a taut, efficient ship as head of the big naval hospital at Seattle. But he got to sea again in time to represent the medical corps at the surrender ceremony aboard the Missouri. He became a top medical officer in the Defense Department and toured the country as part of the Hoover Commission task force on medical service...
Ruthless pruning might have made Black Hand taut and incisive enough to deserve the loving care with which it was put together. As it is, the picture flares occasionally into what it might have been, e.g., a courtroom scene in which a crucial witness falters under a small gesture from the spectators' rows. Dancer Kelly proves capable in a straight role and gets the support of a good cast. As the frustrated detective who has spent 20 years fighting the gang, Actor Naish polishes off a gem of a scene as he drunkenly celebrates his first victorious skirmish...