Word: realism
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Cites Harvard 'Realism...
...realism comes chiefly from the absence of the typical villain-hero relationship that marks the average movie plot. Henry Fonda has the leading part but he only rebels against the mob; he cannot stop the lynching. Fonda takes the position of a muse that realizes, even raises his voice against the injustice, yet when the end comes, he has really been only a bystander. And the villains too are not singly responsible but are rather cowards whose weaknesses combined make a criminal potent enough to kill three...
Most of the contributors are committed to the conventional realism that has by now become a rut for American storytelling. They concentrate humorlessly on a social or psychological problem, they marshal bony facts in straight platoons of narrative, and they employ the English language with literalness and flatness...
...general reaction to the plan was understandably cool. Some of the U.S. press felt that the Quakers, in their earnest search for a true realism based on the possibility of evoking the goodness in man, had been unrealistically premature. Said the New York Herald Tribune: "All men are not yet Quakers; if they were, we might more easily repose our faith in one another's virtue and good will. In the meantime, we seem fated to base our national policies on the sorrowful facts that it takes one to make a war, two to make a peace...
...Guttuso's Italian fellow Communists now object to his work. The poster-bright colors and the shapes which looked as if they had been hacked out by a hoe were reminiscent of Comrade Picasso's art, but like Picasso's they deviated from the "realism" the party presently admires. At the opposite extreme was 52-year-old Antonio Donghi's meticulous The Hunter, which had the quiet dignity of a procession...