Word: realism
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...soul-crushing it is to work and write when behind us stands a political censor and behind him stands the police. Think of how it must shatter the nerves of a Russian writer to worry constantly whether the new party doctrine or revised state formula of 'social realism' or 'formalism' or 'objectivism' . . . has already become passe and the mark only of a 'decadent counter-revolutionary tool of the fascists.' " Lasky expressed his sympathy for Soviet writers who "suddenly find themselves excommunicated as 'poisonous dregs' [because they do not write] odes...
...added height to this already great motion picture. Max Steiner composed background music that is not only deep and appropriate, but at the most dramatic times intensifies the rhythms of speech, producing an effect that few other movies have paralleled. The visual effects do not try any labored realism, but concentrate on significant details or on impressionistic views of the city, and the implications become those of timelessness as well as reality. Victor McLaglen is the Judas, the Faust, and although his story relates closely to the particular environment, he is the most important factor himself, and could be transplanted...
...drawing the character behind a barker's chant have failed miserably. Circus people became either ridiculous or dull under the pens of fascinated, but insensitive authors. "Gus the Great" is no unhappy commentary by someone outside the realm. Mr. Duncan treats his subject with great dignity and honest realism and fails only through his inability to unite the complex threads of his story...
...best-known oil, exhibited at the Academy in 1936, and the Academy's award-winner of the year, showed that Belcher's realism was of a far more literal sort than Ben Shahn's. Belcher once described the painting as "a picture of a shabby though very happy gentleman who is obviously a street musician. He is at home, seated at his table. You can see how he has been enjoying himself-there are heads and tails of herrings on a plate, a bottle which has contained stout, and a glass which betrays the fact that...
Pritchett is most at home writing about the English tradition of picaresque heroes and prurient heroines. The 17th and 18th Centuries, he believes, produced literary techniques which later novelists have been wise to adopt. Smollett developed the physical realism and "chamberpot humor" which characterizes much of Joyce. Richardson introduced the "principle of procrastinated rape [which] is said to be the ruling one in all the great best-sellers." Fielding, Pritchett says, is the granddaddy of them all: in his work the reader can not only "pick out the perennial characters of the main part of English fiction, but . . . many...