Martin Ritt (March 2, 1914 – December 8, 1990) was an American director, producer, and actor, active in film, theatre, and television. He was known mainly as an auteur of socially conscious dramas and literary adaptations, described by Stanley Kauffmann as "one of the most underrated American directors, superbly competent and quietly imaginative."
Four of his films (Edge of the City, Hud, Sounder, and Norma Rae) have been selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant.
Ritt originally attended and played football for Elon College in North Carolina. The stark contrasts of the depression-era South, against his New York City upbringing, instilled in him a passion for expressing the struggles of inequality, which is apparent in the films he directed.[citation needed]
Early theatre
After leaving St. John's University, Ritt found work with a theater group, and began acting in plays. His first performance was as Crown in Porgy and Bess. After his performance drew favorable reviews, Ritt concluded that he could "only be happy in the theater."
Ritt was hired as a playwright for the Roosevelt administration's New Deal Works Progress Administration with the Federal Theater Project, a federal government-funded theater support program. With work hard to find, social inequality obvious, and the Depression in full effect, many WPA theater performers, directors, and writers were influenced by the radical left and Communism. Ritt was among them. Years later, he stated that he had never been a member of the Communist Party, but he had considered himself a leftist and found common ground with some Marxist principles.
Group Theatre
Ritt joined the Theater of Arts, then the Group Theatre in New York City. There, he met Elia Kazan, who cast Ritt as an understudy to his play Golden Boy. Ritt continued his association with Kazan for well over a decade, later assisting—and sometimes filling in for—Kazan at The Actors Studio. He eventually became one of the Studio's few non-performing life members.
During the Broadway run of the play, Ritt directed a production of Sidney Kingsley's play Yellow Jack, using actors from Winged Victory. They rehearsed between midnight and 3 am after the Winged Victory performances.
The play had a brief Broadway run and was performed again in Los Angeles when the Winged Victory troupe moved there to make the film version.
Television and the Blacklist
The May 7, 1948, issue of the Counterattack newsletter
After working as a playwright with the WPA, acting on stage, and directing hundreds of plays, Ritt became a successful television director and producer. He produced and directed episodes of Danger, Somerset Maugham TV Theatre (1950–51), Starlight Theatre (1951), and The Plymouth Playhouse (1953).
Counterattack alleged that Ritt had helped Communist Party-affiliated locals of the New York-based 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 Theater, founded on a Russian model, and the Federal Theater Project (which Congress had stopped funding in 1939 because of what some anti-New Deal congressmen claimed to be a left-wing political tone to some productions), were also known to HUAC. He was finally blacklisted by the television industry when a Syracuse grocer charged him with donating money to Communist China in 1951. He supported himself for five years by teaching at the Actors Studio.
Career in Hollywood
Edge of the City
Unable to work in the television industry, Ritt returned to the theater for several years. By 1956, the Red Scare had decreased in intensity, and he turned to film directing. His first film as director was Edge of the City (1957), an important film for Ritt and an opportunity to give voice to his experiences. Based on the story of a union dock worker who faces intimidation by a corrupt boss, the film incorporates many themes that were to influence Ritt over the years: corruption, racism, intimidation of the individual by the group, defense of the individual against government oppression, and most notably, the redeeming quality of mercy and the value of shielding others from evil, even at the cost of sacrificing one's own reputation, career, or life.
Ritt directed Paris Blues (1961) with Woodward and Newman. He made one more film with Wald, Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man (1962), in which Newman played a supporting role. Ritt and Newman's next collaboration was 1963's Hud, starring Newman as the eponymous character. The film was a major financial success, and both men received Academy Award Nominations. It was also the first of four films that James Wong Howe would shoot for Ritt, and the second film for which he would win an Academy Award for Best Black-and-White Cinematography. The duo's fifth film together, The Outrage (1964), is an American retelling of the Kurosawa film Rashomon starring Newman, Laurence Harvey, Claire Bloom, Edward G. Robinson, Howard da Silva, and William Shatner, and reuniting the pair with Howe. Like Kurosawa's film, Ritt employed a flashback structure in his film, and Newman traveled to Mexico and spent time speaking to local residents to study the accents. In spite of the pair's creative efforts, the film did not find the same success that Hud had had. However, their next collaboration, Hombre (1967), was a major financial success, but would prove to be the last film Ritt made with Newman.
In 1976, Ritt made one of the first dramatic feature films about the blacklist, The Front, starring Woody Allen. The Front satirizes the use of "fronts", men and women who (either as a personal favor or in exchange for payment) allowed their names to be listed as writers for scripts actually authored by blacklisted writers. The film was based on the experiences of, and written by, one of Ritt's closest friends, screenwriter Walter Bernstein, who was blacklisted for eight years beginning in 1950.
Ritt ended the decade by directing Casey's Shadow (1978), starring his Awake and Sing! co-star Walter Matthau, and Norma Rae (1979), which won Sally Field her first Oscar for Best Actress.
↑Garfield, David (1980). "Birth of The Actors Studio: 1947-1950". A Player's Place: The Story of The Actors Studio. New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc. p.57. ISBN0-02-542650-8. Whenever Kazan had to miss a class for professional reasons, his associate, Martin Ritt, would take over the session. Ritt was thoroughly familiar with Kazan's procedures and with the special talents and shortcomings of each member of the group.
↑Broeske, Pat H. (November 25, 1985). "The Curious Evolution of John Rambo: How He Hacked His Way Through the Jungles of Hollywood". Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles. p. AB32.
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