Word: realism
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Ring of Treason is a semi-documentary spy drama so set on realism that it takes one of Britain's most pedestrian episodes of peacetime espionage as a model, apparently to avoid drama, thrills or sex. The movie re-creates events leading to the 1961 conviction of Gordon Arnold Lonsdale, born Konon Trofimovich Molody, who was recently swapped back to the Russians in exchange for Greville Wynne. Still in a British prison for their association with Lonsdale are pub-crawling Chief Petty Officer Henry Houghton; his plump, middle-aged sweetheart Elizabeth Gee, who filched diagrams, manuals and Admiralty fleet...
Quoting at length from Archibald MacLeish, Pusey said that contemporary civilization fancies itself "the first to look at man as he is and to dare to see him." But these claims to primal realism are false. The Greek view of man was equally "realistic," seeing "the defeated hero, Prometheus on the bloody stone...
Cold War Frontier. The main carryover from the earlier stories that Cornwell built up in Spy is not a character but an atmosphere: grubby realism and moral squalor, the frazzled, fatigued sensitivity of decent men obliged to betray or kill others no worse than themselves. Cornwell said recently: "I chose spying as a subject for reasons of polemic. Western democracy seems to have one unifying force: the idea that individuals are more valuable than philosophies. My intention was to write about a group of people who consciously abandon the Western principle in order to defend...
...story, which transpires at a Caribbean resort amid plastic palmettos and other touches of tropical realism, can best be described as follows: zzzzzzz. The players are equally interesting. Nancy Kwan, who claims to be a genuine Eurasian, looks like an American chorine with Scotch-taped eyelids. Jill St. John, who considers herself a comedienne, puts up a good front. Robert Goulet, whose talent is for singing, doesn't sing. And Keenan Wynn, who has probably been in worse pictures, looks as if he can't remember when...
...Russell's opponent, plays dirty, and most of the film concerns Russell's attempt to decide whether he should use Cantwell's own methods to fight back. The personal battle is played against the noise and glitter of a wide-open convention, done up for the screen with superb realism...