Word: ritt
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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...
...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...
...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...