Word: ritt
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...MARTIN RITT hasn't transformed the dross of The Great White Hope into a good film, at least his jumbling of theatrical convention and film cliche makes it fairly easy to watch. Despite playwright Howard Sackler's screenplay, and his play's prime standing as a Kultcha classic, Ritt hasn't stooped to the traditional homage Hollywood usually pays to Broadway hit-dom. The Great White Hope is severely divided, but many of the tensions the black actors manage to convey are true. At certain points-particularly when the splendid Moses Gunn, as an anachronistic black nationalist street preacher, accosts...
...none of Johnson's sensual excesses (and only one all-suffering white wife, drearily enacted by Jane Alexander). The ironic sense of his own destiny which allowed Johnson to cheat and compromise his way to personal security is switched to Jefferson's stereotyped Jewish manager-and how Sackler, Ritt, and producer Lawrence Turman must have masochistically gloried in that character's representation! Even Johnson's superb defensive fighting style (displayed recently in two documentaries, The Legendary Champions and Jack Johnson ) is altered; though Jones' Jefferson looks as greased and bouncy as Gypsy Joe Harris in the pitifully few boxing scenes...
...boxing footage cannot compare to the celebrated gutfights of Body and Soul and The Harder They Fall. Moreover, Director Martin Ritt has staged some segments as if they were to be razzed at a Panther rally. One in particular, when a prayer is chanted for the Black Hope, must rank as the most patronizing view of Negro life since Guess Who's Coming to Dinner...
...productions. Some 200 tons of anthracite coal were shipped from Mahoney, Pennsylvania to the studio in Hollywood for a coal wall. Paramount Studios built the longest interior setting ever constructed on a Hollywood sound stage to simulate the interior of the coal mine. With a passion for realistic detail Ritt shot the film in a coal town in Eckley, Pennsylvania. All the homes in the town were repainted slate gray, the color of coal dust, giving a sense of the misery of the time...
...vehicle for describing the political situation. But Widerburg's sets and shooting are too beautiful to convince the viewer of the miserable conditions of the workers. He makes it easy to get caught up in the aesthestic brilliance of his film at the expense of the drama. Martin Ritt was so anxious to portray the dismal realities of the coal town that he originally shot in black and white, taking obvious risks at the box office. The film finally became so expensive that Paramount insisted that he shoot in color...