Word: ritt
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...overly sentimental--in fact, critics of the film have claimed the environment it etches is harsher than what they personally experienced in similar times and places and table-turning social truths more it powerfully effective. Cicely Tyson and Paul Winfield stand out as Kevin Hooks' parents: Martin (Hud) Ritt directs with surprising force and tact...
...Ritt - U.S.A...
...film does, however, seem somewhat healthier than the play as written (contrary to current belief). And this is despite the fact that in every plastic sense, Ritt is a perfectly lousy director. Some of the scenes are indistinguishable from those taped on stage for the Ed Sullivan show. When Ritt wants the audience to know that a crowd is present, he frames a few hundred thousand people cheering. Period. When he wants to emphasize the "frail nobility" and "still small voice" of a group of blacks praying for Johnson before the stadium in Reno, he sticks them in what suddenly...
...What Ritt does do besides give the film's supporting acting a derivative panache is make Jefferson a lot more angry than he was on the stage. And he achieves this simply by intelligent use of what has become a hackneyed editing cover-up-the reaction shot. James Earl Jones knows what Johnson was all about; if the boxer learned to resent most white men, he also pitied his black mammy and scorned the life she led. Ritt plugged in Jones' knowing smirk enough times to keep me some-what interested in the overheated proceedings...
...late Odets play: "Half-baked idealism is the peritonitis of the soul." Odets himself knew that he was dissipated and corrupted when he wrote that line, having lost his Depression radicalism somewhere between World War II and Hollywood. Sackler, however, tries to effect that which he never possessed; and Ritt, himself far removed from his honest work, Edge of the City and Hud, cannot cover for him. The Jewish playwright is no longer in a position to voice radical ethos convincingly. That may be the real tragedy behind The Great White Hope...