Word: tautly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...NIGHT WATCH. Five men seek an underground escape route from a Paris prison-a commonplace theme developed with uncommon skill in this taut French thriller...
...aims to seize the conscience but grabs the playgoer's lapel instead, like a standing grievance committee. It strives to be fresh, but its story of Southern shotgun justice is overly familiar, and what powers Mr. Charlie is not its topical subject but a contemporary mood, the taut-nerved spirit of violence that seethes through the play's language and characters. When Baldwin finally relates the problem of color to the problem of evil, he shows more childish spite than tragic sense: "If I ever see Him, I'll spit in His face...
...last film of French Director Jacques Becker, who died shortly after completing it in 1960, Night Watch engages interest on several levels. As a straight thriller, it is taut, bone-bare, agonizingly suspenseful, and flawlessly acted by its leading players, all nonprofessionals (except Mark Michel as Gaspard). As a movie about prison life, it is authentic; La Santé's guards are not brutes, they are merely inhumanly efficient machines, trained to perform surgery on the contents of a food parcel, to count skulls in the numbered cubicles where prisoners contemplate their anonymity. As a meaningful human drama...
...finishes his prayer in stone. But is it a blessed victory? Naturally not. Slowly, and then in a landslide rush, Golding undermines the reader's faith in the saintly fool. Soon Jocelin himself is wrestling with the high cost of inspiration, strung taut between the tenter hooks of divine and earthly means. He condones adultery and acquiesces in an accomplished murder to keep the master mason...
Losey should have stopped here. Although it would have been a limited statement--the downfall of a weak man--it would have been unified and taut. But in the final thirty minutes he drags Tony down into hell and drags the film down with him. Barrett is taken back by Tony who desperately needs him. The reversal is made explicit; Tony waits on him, cringes from him, plays childish games with him. But Tony's demise is no longer very interesting, and so we question Barrett's motives. Questioning, however, is fruitless. Is Barrett a homosexual? Does he want Tony...