Ritt, Martin

RITT, MARTIN (1914-1990). A veteran of Group Theatre and at first an actor, Martin Ritt notably directed early television live drama and then fell to the blacklist. Rehabilitated in the film world as political pressures eased, Ritt made himself one of the few successful leftwing directors to take on big budget Hollywood films with big stars. Often falling short of success artistically or commercially, his efforts brought important themes to the screen, outraging red-baiting critics like Pauline Kael, but also proving what could be done, even in Hollywood.

Son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, growing up poor in New York, Ritt made his way to college thanks to a football scholarship to Elon College (home of the “Fighting Christians”) in North Carolina. He found his calling in the next few years, in Federal Theater, the Theater of Action, and finally Group Theater, working with Harold Clurman and Elia Kazan. In Group, he made his notable debut as an actor, often as the tough-looking proletarian. Inducted into the Army Air Force in 1943, Ritt did radio and film as an actor and director for the war effort until mustered out in 1946. He soon got work on CBS as producer and then director of up to fifty live television shows a year. Driven from TV, Ritt returned to theater and as director worked with Arthur Miller, directing the memorable “A View from the Bridge,” seen as an answer to On The Waterfront.

By 1957, Ritt found his way to Hollywood. He remade Edge of the City (1957), a tough, interracial television drama as a film. Edge of the City appeared in the same year as No Down Payment (1957), easily the toughest of the genre of suburb-disillusionment films of the time. Twenty-four other films followed. Producer Jerry Wald in particular offered Ritt projects with “A” budgets and stars, as well as all the inherent risks of overblown Hollywood productions. Ritt brought in as colleagues a curious husband-and-wife team of writers, screenplay veteran and reluctant “Friendly Witness” Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr. He employed, on several films, another and more famous husband-and-wife team: actors Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.

The Long Hot Summer, Hud, Hombre, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Sounder, Norma Rae, The Molly Maguires and Cross Creek among others gave Ritt a large record of cinematic big time films in only a decade or so. Boasting two Faulkner adaptations, several films with his old friend Newman as star or his close friend Walter Bernstein as writer, he prompted Pauline Kael among other embittered Cold Warrior critics to rage at his success, film by film. The controversies around Hud and The Molly Maguires sparked lively debates, while Sounder and Norma Rae were so beloved and on such dear subjects as black life and successful unionization in the South and cooled red-baiting criticism. Actress Sally Field, her career transformed by playing the Southern mill hand who leads a strike, may be seen as Ritt’s directing master-stroke.

The Front (1976), made possible by Walter Bernstein’s longtime friendship with Woody Allen, covered a wide swath of blacklistees’ experience, making great comedy from the fate of the innocent and apolitical shlemiel, played by Allen, drawn into the blacklisting by virtue—but on television and not in Hollywood—of “fronting” for talented writers. Rare, almost non-existent, would be the films in which the persecuted protagonist was actually “guilty” of being a Communist, let alone guilty and proud of it.

Ritt closed his career with lesser films: Barbra Streisand stealing the camera in Nuts (1987); and a rather confused Stanley & Iris (1990), treating the personal crisis of illiteracy in modern society. Ritt was nevertheless hailed at his death as a path-breaking figure in film. If he had done nothing else, The Molly Maguires (1970) and Norma Rae (1979) had presented important chapters in US labor history, older and recent, to new generations of Americans.

Buhle, Paul and Dave Wagner. Hide in Plain Sight: the Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television, 1950-2002. New York: Palgrave, 2003.

McGilligan, Pat and Paul Buhle. Tender Comrades: a Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist. New York: St. Martins, 1997.

Miller, Gabriel. The Films of Martin Ritt: Fanfare for the Common Man. Jackson: University, 2000.