Word: high tension
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...nicely poised, sometimes ironic balance of twin protagonists at play in a high-stakes game of blindman's buff gives The Hunt for Red October solid dramatic tension. Still, this obviously could have been a movie in which a lot of people stood around talking in tight spaces; in other words, a movie that refused to move. But screenwriters Larry Ferguson and Donald Stewart do not overexplain (or underexplain) either its technology or the intricacies of its far-darting plot. We know all we need to know to keep our bearings and not a monosyllable more. And director John McTiernan...
Nonetheless, the high quality of the acting makes this production worth watching. While Simon's one-liners are funny, it is the silences of Kanter as Kate, Eugene's mother, and Blumenthal as Jack, his father, that represent the play's best moments. Their interaction with one another and with the play's other actors is first-rate. Even the four Mather residents who walked through the back of the set during a climactic scene between the two parents did not manage to spoil the tension...
...With tension already high between Washington and Managua, the politically tinged charges were hardly surprising. Long-strained relations soured further last month when the U.S. invaded Panama -- which the Sandinistas predictably denounced as Yanqui imperialism. To make matters worse, U.S. soldiers burst into the residence of the Nicaraguan Ambassador to Panama and searched it for weapons, a blatant violation of diplomatic immunity. Managua retaliated by expelling 20 American diplomats. Still bristling last week, Ortega drew a nasty parallel between the ambush and the November slaying of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador, a crime many believe was committed...
...only other unfortunate choice in this production is the addition of music, presumably to heighten the tension of the play. The problem is that the tension is already running excruciatingly high, and the synthesized music, often overamplified, is simply annoying. In more than one case music is used to signify an approaching flashback, and the actors seem to wait for it to end before continuing the action. Not surprisingly, this takes away some of the fluidity of the performance...
...this scenario: Deborah Norville, 31, a blond comer at NBC who was brought in to read the news on the top-rated Today show. TV gossips surmised that Norville was being groomed to replace Jane Pauley, 38, as Bryant Gumbel's co-host. Suddenly the Today show became high- tension drama: Is Bryant being nicer to Deborah than to Jane? Did you notice a chill in the air? Cue the organ music...