Word: realism
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...There's no reason why realism shouldn't be poetic in its effect... But now that Kazan is beginning to impose on realistic plays like Sweet Bird and Cat [on a Hot Tin Roof] an operatic style, I think it's dangerous and forced." The mainstream of American drama ("I hate to use phrases like 'mainstream,'" says Tynan) has to do with "observable reality. I think--let's be frank--that Kazan has moved too far away from that without the moral or social realities that are necessary to sustain it. Even in a play like Our Town ... the performances...
Room at the Top (Romulus; Continental), a film version of the bestselling novel by Britain's John Braine (TIME, May 27, 1957), is a powerful, disturbing piece of cinema realism. On the face of it. the film is a social satire: a hilarious lampoon of British provincial society, an ironic study of Angry Young Manners and morals, a Swiftian extravaganza on the problems of a social climber in a society without stairs. But behind the comic mask there is the tragedy of social change, which is here expounded as the agony of moral growth, as the spiritual disaster...
Robinson displays a sure hand in manipulating the high humor of the quaint incidents which divert him. While his characters are not burdened with realism, they do have considerable vitality to them. If their language is complex and perhaps even elusive at times, it has a consistency and logic that emerge in a second reading. The logic and consistency seem a sign that the author has planned precisely where he is taking his characters; if their destination is not clear in the excerpt, readers doubtless will find clarification when they see the whole...
...prophet of doom, Dr. Dubos is convinced that in the future, as in the last 100 years, social reforms will do as much as doctors and drugs to eradicate preventable disease. But man, he insists, must face hard facts with hardheaded realism. Disease does not surrender unconditionally. The very sanitary techniques that did so much to control infections in the 19th century set the stage for the ravages of polio in the 20th. German measles, once universal in childhood and then only a "trivial accident," now skips many sanitized youngsters; but if a woman gets it in the first three...
...Prima Donnas. TV's Gunsmoke, originally a radio show, carried the revolution a step further. Gifted, Colorado-born Scriptwriter John Meston took pains to place the psychological realism in a setting of regional realism. When the show hit hard, a hasty passel of horse operators tried to follow his lead, but soon got lost in the chaparral cliches. Almost two years passed before a few of the more carefully written shows (Rawhide, Rifleman) began to get trailwise...