Word: ritt
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CASEY'S SHADOW Directed by Martin Ritt Screenplay by Carol Sobieski...
...script is well served by Director Martin Ritt (Sounder, The Front), who has collaborated with Cinematographer John Alonzo and Production Designer Robert Luthardt to paint the colorful Louisiana and New Mexico settings in crisp detail. Ritt has the good sense to stretch out the tense race sequences (with slow motion, if necessary) and gallop by the story's mawkish father-son, brother-brother and child-horse confrontations. He even gets away with the overheated scenes that depict the star colt's birth and its mother's untimely death...
...most effective statement made by The Front comes during the final credits when one learns that the director, Martin Ritt, the writer, Walter Bernstein, Mostel, Bernardi, and two other actors in the movie were all blacklisted in the early '50s. The real impact of the McCarthy period for a moment slips...
Some interesting and normally intelligent actors are involved in this nonsense. Robert Shaw is the master crook, and Martin Ritt, better known as a director (Hud, Sounder, Conrack), plays the Swiss cop who is his nemesis. Jon Voight plays Ritt's assistant - and unwitting tool - while Jacqueline Bisset does time as lover to both Shaw and Voight. Their skills are all frittered aimlessly away in a movie that offers slowness of pace as an earnest of artistic integrity. The only emotion that the audience is likely to work up watching this unconscionable bore is an irresistible desire...
Woody Allen and Zero Mostel playing it straight? Director Martin Ritt (Sounder, Hud) has unsmilingly cast the two in Columbia Pictures' The Front, a drama about Hollywood blacklisting in the '50s. For Mostel it's all bitter experience, for he was interrogated by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955 and scorned by movie producers for a decade. For Allen, playing a bookie who lets a blacklisted writer use his name, drama is all new, and he claims to be, as usual, nervous. "I can't guarantee the outcome," he says...