Word: ritt
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Directed by MARTIN RITT...
Sounder is a variation of my grandfather's story: in many ways it is a variation of every black man's story. Adapted by black playwright Lonne Elder III (Cerrmonies in Dark Old Men), from William Armstrong's powerful allegory of black life in America. Director Martin Ritt carefully examines the economic, cultural, and judicial elements of white American society that impede the black man's search for freedom...
...Ritt elaborates the theme of white exploitation of blacks in a series of interrelated vignettes, starting from the opening scene in which the father. Nathan Lee (Paul Winfield) and David Lee are involved in one of the basic struggles in life--the search for food. Despite the aid of their hunting dog. Sounder, the two are unsuccessful in their search for a coon. The family goes to bed hungry. Alone with Rebecca, Nathan Lee curses his existence, but she says "We've been through these hard times before, Nathan Lee and we've made it." "But made it to what...
Economic exploitation forces Nathan Lee to steal from the white man's smokehouse to find his family. His arrest gives Ritt the chance to show the kangaroo justice blacks receive in white courts. After a speedy trial, Nathan lee is sentenced to one year of hard labor at a parish workcamp, a form of modern slavery only slightly more obvious than the scrip my grandfather was advanced...
Besides self-reliance, the only hope the family has is the false one that whites have always held out to blacks: Jesus will provide. But Ritt clearly holds this solution in contempt. Opening a scene by showing a graveyard adjacent to a black church, he cuts to a line of ancient matrons and a zombie-like preacher who drone out in a deathly wall, "Give Me That Old Time Religion." When the preacher (played, ironically, by Rev. Thomas N. Phillips, a real-life black preacher) pays a call on the Morgans to tell them that the whites at the courthouse...