An actor's director Exploring the social dimensions of Martin Ritt's films Archived article from Jan 19, 2001 By Diane Cornell   You probably won't recognize film director Martin Ritt's name, but the films he made are some of the most distinguished in movie history: "The Long Hot Summer" (1958), "Hud" (1963), "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold" (1965), "Hombre" (1967), "Sounder" (1972), "The Front" (1976) and "Norma Rae" (1979). A focus on how ordinary people react when forced to confront social or political issues is at the heart of director Martin Ritt's films, says Professor Gabriel Miller in his latest book. Photo by Roy Groething/Jersey Pictures It is not surprising that Ritt's name is largely unknown. Unlike some of his more visible peers, directors such as John Ford or Frank Capra, Ritt's name never appeared above the title of a film, nor did he seek out such attention. "Ritt felt it was the ensemble that mattered in moviemaking, not the individuals. He concentrated on how material was presented by the entire group, by the actors, set designers, everyone involved in the production of a film, not just the director," observes Gabriel Miller, professor and chair of the department of English on the Newark campus. Miller is the author of the recently published "The Films of Martin Ritt: Fanfare for the Common Man" (University Press of Mississippi). The book, Miller's sixth, is the first complete study of Ritt's movies. The filmmaker, whom Miller calls America's most important director of social films, made 26 movies in a career that lasted from 1957 to his death in 1990. Most were small, character-driven films with a moral undertone. "They have a small, intimate look without big Hollywood effects or self-conscious camera angles," Miller notes. "His movies are essentially American -- American themes and American stories." The films are an outgrowth of Ritt's beginnings in the Federal Theatre Project, a program of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration, and also the Group Theatre, which he joined in 1937. That company, co-founded by Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman, was in part modeled on the Moscow Art Theatre, whose methods and ensemble approach it emulated. The Group Theatre was committed to producing new works by American writers and Ritt's experiences there would shape his entire career and have a major impact on his directing style, Miller maintains. Only one of Ritt's major films, "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold," was ever set outside the United States. The movies Ritt made share a small, intimate feel but lack a distinctive visual signature. Miller says that is because Ritt preferred to concentrate on character development. "He made movies about people," Miller notes. "Invariably, they were people caught up in social or political issues that interested him, but it was observing his characters, as they react to challenge and grow, that was Ritt's central focus." Ritt trusted his actors, giving them leeway to explore and shape their characters. Their allegiance to him becomes apparent when one notes the big Hollywood names Miller was able to interview for his book: Paul Newman, Kirk Douglas and Sally Field, who contributed the book's foreword. Although he calls the actors "very sweet," he says in the end they didn't really contribute very much to his examination of Ritt. Miller learned the most during several one- and two-week trips to the Motion Picture Academy in Los Angeles, where he pored over Ritt's papers. Ritt loved location shooting and, despite having been raised in New York City and living as an adult in Los Angeles, he filmed primarily in the rural South, where many of his movies are set. "Ritt had a romantic ideal and a sense of attachment to the land. He loved to look back at a preindustrial America. His storylines often focused on how the industrial revolution destroyed man's sense of identification to country and culture," Miller says. In one of his best-known movies, "Hud," Ritt takes the notion of a Western hero and depicts his selfish side -- at the end of the movie Hud sells his father's ranch to oil prospectors. The film, says Miller, portrays the forerunner of the corporate man willing to sacrifice ideals for profit. "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold" takes a similar approach, depicting nameless government bureaucrats willing to destroy people to maintain power. "Hombre" shows how the coming of the railroad spoiled a small town. In 1952, Ritt was acting, directing and producing television programs when Cold War paranoia caught up with him, and he was abruptly fired. Ritt had been blacklisted. Although not directly named by the House Un-American Activities Committee, Ritt was mentioned in a newsletter called Counterattack, published by American Business Consultants, a group formed by three former FBI agents. Counterattack alleged that Ritt had helped Communist Party-affiliated locals of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union stage their annual show. Also cited was a show he had directed for Russian War Relief at Madison Square Garden. His associations with the Group Theatre, founded on a Russian model, and the Federal Theatre Project, which Congress had stopped funding in 1939 because of the political tone of its productions, didn't help either, Miller says. "Unlike many of his friends, Ritt was never named or subpoenaed; it was all guilt by association," Miller asserts. He wasn't hired to work in TV or films for the next six years. During this period, his family's income relied on his stints directing plays at small, regional theaters; his wife's job selling advertisements for the phone company; and his talent as a handicapper at the racetrack. Years later he would state that he had never been a member of the Communist Party, although he considered himself a leftist liberal and agreed with a lot of the communist ideology. In 1976, Ritt made the first movie about the Hollywood blacklist, "The Front," starring Woody Allen. The film satirizes the use of "fronts," men and women who took credit for scripts actually authored by blacklisted writers. The film was based on the experience of one of Ritt's closest friends, screenwriter Walter Bernstein, who was blacklisted for eight years beginning in 1950. Miller was attracted to Ritt by the director's sense of community and optimism. "Ritt was optimistic about mankind's ability to rise above adversity to achieve a kind of harmony and a sense of community. I am more cynical than that, but I admire his dream." Miller notes that in the 1970s Ritt grew gentler and more open-minded and, in turn, his films became more hopeful. It was then that he made such family-friendly films as "Sounder" and "Murphy's Romance." It was also during this period that he made perhaps his greatest commercial success, "Norma Rae." Although the film is often characterized as a story about the struggle to unionize a cotton mill in the South, Ritt would later say the movie was more about the main character's maturation than about unionism. Miller would like to see Ritt get more credit for his contributions to film, although, he notes, the director himself never sought the limelight. "He didn't seek to make a star out of himself. He never had a monumental success. Yet he was still able to make movies about serious subjects that were politically important or socially important, and he continued to do that for 30 years, despite never having had a true blockbuster."

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