Word: realism
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...performers-using the late, great Poet William Butler Yeats's excellent translation-caught the clenched force of the play, and the grand dimensions. They played daringly, theatrically, with no mingy concessions to "realism"; but they tempered their intensity with style...
Barbara is crazy over horses; Robert likes antiques. Almost against his will, Robert keeps kissing a pretty girl (Diana Lynn) and Barbara is not amused. By reaching greedily for both realism and farce, the picture loses at both ends and rapidly falls apart in all directions. The solemn scenes emerge as tiresomely trivial. The comedy scenes, by contrast, are disquieting: they manage to characterize the hero and heroine as fairly unpleasant young people with oddly frivolous notions about earning a living, adultery, practical joking, simple decency and the training of young children...
Bucking the hard realism of France at the turn of the century, Rostand came on the theatrical scene as an entertainer. His flamboyant wit, despite its aborted, cloying idealism, makes for brilliant entertainment in, the deft hands of Jose Ferrer in this week's opening of Cyrano de Bergerac...
...production overflowing with exciting experiments, the most daring is its abandonment of realism as the medium of expression. Painted backdrops, liberal use of miniatures, and Disneyesque castles mark an important and significant departure from Hollywood's fantastic absorption with accuracy and detail. Applying to his sets the Aristotelian dictum that the function of the artist is to present the essence, rather than the particularity, of life-- which Shakespeare so wonderfully exemplifies in his use of dramatic poetry as a vehicle of expression-- Olivier reaches a level of perception into life that has seldom been equalled in motion pictures...
...effect of realism, is heightened by the wide variety of characters brought into view: a Polish Jew, a German widow, a petty fascist, an English flier, etc. (English titles are provided for the eight foreign languages used in the background behind the Englishmen.) Yet among all these there is no villain, in the Hollywood sense of the word-even the fascist is an understandable human being. Nowhere have the Swiss fallen into the trap of personifying evil in well-known typed characters: the snivelling, mustached Italian informer, the hard-bitten, blond German storm trooper, or the bloated soap-box Mussolini...