Word: ritt
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...world beyond Yamacraw--before he is fired. She dunned some of the film's simplifications but saluted its spirit. Stanley Kauffman in The New Republic, applauded the film as entertainment, though he scored its faults more heavily than Kael; he singled out Jon Voight's performance and Martin Ritt's tactful, sympathetic direction, and noted that if the film relies on sentiment, organic, well-dramatized sentiment is always justifiable...
...film does have problems. But they have little to do with race, liberality or mushiness. Ritt, Ravetch and Frank revel in the grotesque. The school superintendent and principal (glosses of groups of figures from Conroy's book) are educational Bull Connors. More interesting characters, like the island's hermit Mad Billie, and a fast-talking island slicker named Quickfellow, have neither history nor room for growth. The filmmakers also fail to develop some intriguing themes: Conroy must have influenced his children's lives beyond the classroom, but when their usually stand-offish parents strike to protest Conroy's dismissal, there...
Directed by MARTIN RITT...
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...