Word: sacklers
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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...
...indict a society through its treatment of an exceptional citizen-a rarely effective approach-is, in this case, justified. Indeed, not only has the game always aroused atavistic sentiments, but its management has also been incredibly racist. What is disappointing and revealing about The Great White Hope is author Sackler's inability to make use both of the more obvious Clay-Johnson parallels, and Johnson's own unique character...
Given the historical context, it may seem nigh impossible to overstate the repressive prejudices of Johnson's time. However, that is precisely what Sackler has done. Most of Johnson's personality has been removed from the playwright's Jack Jefferson, making him more defenseless and unblemished than Johnson's staunchest supporters ever claimed. Sackler's character has 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...
WHEN preceded by the statement, "much of what follows is true," the entire play, and much of the film, strikes me as being terribly obscene. Sackler attempts to voice radical, anti-white-capitalist sentiment, but he seems to have a pretty limited concept of how racism is manifested socially and culturally. (Given the skeletonization of Johnson, and the limited glimpses of the American white community, this is probably inevitable.) When corruptive social forces are embodied as moustache-twirling villains, what is produced is not indignation, but derisive laughter. Similarly, if a black man is victorious even in self-imposed defeat...
...reminded of a hilarious line once spoken seriously in a 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...