Word: realism
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...film such as To Live in Peace, the most recent Italian Import, is cloquent proof that straightforwardness and simple realism are far better dramatic ingredients than the usual artificiality and mock heroics that accompany war movies. Even the story is simple: it concerns a little mountain town almost untouched by the war which rages around it. Untouched, at least, until two escaped American prisoners looking for shelter, which is given them by a local farmer. Their hiding and subsequent discovery provide ample opportunity for both comedy and tragedy, as well as for straight drama...
...their deliberate crudity is almost as obvious a barrier to appreciation as the lock on his door. When British Sculptor Henry Moore was commissioned to carve a Madonna and Child for a church, he resolved to "meet the subject half way," as he put it, by substituting a limited realism for his usual smooth abstraction. The compromise was recognizably human, in a streamlined sort of fashion, but inertly bland as stone could...
...Happen and J. F. Powers' sketches of Catholic clergy in Prince of Darkness. Lionel Trilling's The Middle of the Journey was a thoughtful but disappointing study of New York liberal intellectuals. Saul Bellow's The Victim, for the most part a well-controlled blend of realism and parable, was the year's most intelligent study of the Jew in U.S. society. Bellow's method recalled-without aping-that of the Czech genius, Franz Kafka...
This kiddie-car plot will not dismay admirers of Novelist James Hilton, who have learned that his vehicles are always freighted with something worth unloading. In Goodbye, Mr. Chips it was Tender Sentiment; in Lost Horizon it was Thrilling Adventure; in this picture it is Gripping Realism. The story, which takes place in a British mill town between wars, sets forth in sweeping Hiltonian periods the author's social beliefs; he is squarely back of good government and sanitation, strongly opposed to alcoholism...
...realism, This Time Tomorrow is almost void of sense; as symbolism, it is by no means rich in suggestion. All cluttered up with blackouts, electrical storms, laboratory rats, hypnotic trances, scientific jargon and mystical plumage, it may, and then again may not, be deep; but there is no doubt whatever that it is dull...