Word: realism
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...sheltering and aiding underground agents until he is betrayed by a local girl to the Nazis and put before a firing squad. The Nazis are routine screen villains. The priest, the girl, the principal partisans and a dozen minor characters play their parts with newsreel-like simplicity and telling realism...
...Philippine retreat. But MGM has succumbed to the usual temptation of ascribing too much glory to too small a company. What was originally an honest account of the P.T. boats' performance has now been magnified and somewhat distorted; too many guns and too much shooting have detracted from the realism which could have made this one of the few really good war pictures...
Despite some indignation over this devotion to Composer Giacomo Puccini's realism of plot and tender score, the first performance of La Bohème was a success. The critics aloofly condemned Puccini for writing down to the mob. But there were 15 curtain calls. The great Giuseppe Verdi was notably absent, but Pietro (Cavalleria Rusticana) Mascagni and Ruggiero (Pagliacci) Leoncavallo, sitting in boxes, led the cheering. Tall, droop-mustached Giacomo Puccini, 37, tearfully embraced Toscanini. La Bohème, a work with a realistic human story,* has been one of the most popular operas ever since...
...outgrowth of the American genre is the detective farce, of which Craig Rice (and Elliot Paul, in a different way) is an exponent. She invests unholy living and heinous dying with a high atmosphere of mixed excitement and amusement. The excitement is provided by realism of a sort-the realism which goes with the ruthlessness of gangsters and other criminal ugliness-and it is set to dialogue of the Hemingway type...
...methods of realism are only a tool. In blending the horrible with the ludicrous, alcohol becomes the catalyst. Drink encourages characters endowed with normal human cowardice to plunge gaily into the ugliest and most dangerous situations and carry them off with unexpected turns of drunken ingenuity. The puzzle is no longer a chief attraction. The principal characters are all detectives and all Watsons...