Tag: Martin Ritt

A Good Watch Despite Junior High School English Class

May 24, 2020 – Cross Creek (1983) Amazon Prime Rental

Cross Creek is a sweet story about how a writer in the 1930s, played by Mary Steenburgen, abandons her husband and life in New York and moves to a remote part of Florida to write her novel. The writer learns to be independent, develops friendships with her neighbors, balances her autonomy with a romantic relationship, and ultimately learns to write from her own experience, rather than to emulate the gothic novels she loves. Since this is a true story about the writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, I don’t think it is a spoiler to report that in the end, she writes the novel The Yearling.

I read The Yearling in Junior High. It was the year that all the books they assigned in English class were about animals: the two I remember besides The Yearling are Old Yeller and Call of the Wild. I guess they figured that all kids like animals and so would like books about animals. They figured wrong about me. I found The Yearling and the other animal books to be completely uninteresting. At that point in my life, I only wanted to read science fiction.  

Cross Creek would have been boring to me then too. It is a family picture, without stakes beyond the emotional development of the characters. It could have been a saccharine Hallmark movie if it weren’t for the direction of Martin Ritt and the great performance from Mary Steenburgen. For the most part, the movie avoids sentimentality and presents a gently compelling story. The exception is the overwrought score. No music from this movie is ending up on my Shelter-In-Place Streaming Playlist.

One other nice thing about Cross Creek is the reunion of Mary Steenburgen and Malcolm McDowell, who has a small part as the editor Max Perkins. The two actors were in one of my favorite unsung movies, Time After Time, a 1979 thriller/romance where H.G. Wells chases Jack the Ripper through time to what was then current-day San Francisco. I am due for a rewatch of this movie, so look for a review of Time After Time on this blog coming soon.

Cross Creek is the third Martin Ritt film I have watched since the pandemic began. The first two were  Paris Blues and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. It is not the last Ritt Film I will watch – we are going to see Norma Rae as soon as we can get Henry to sit down with us long enough to watch. What is surprising is how different all these Martin Ritt films are from one another: a tense, black and white spy drama, a genial story of American Jazz musicians in Paris, and this sweet family drama.

Charming But Slight

April 23, 2020 – Paris Blues (1961) Criterion Channel

Paris Blues is the story of two American Jazz musicians, Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier, and the two visiting American tourists, Joanne Woodward and Diahann Carroll, who they fall in love with. It is a charming but slight movie. The most memorable part of Paris Blues is the music, composed and performed (off-camera) by Duke Ellington with a guest appearance (in the soundtrack and on-camera) by Louis Armstrong. This is the third movie about jazz (also: A Song is Born and Chico and Rita) and the second movie directed by Martin Ritt (also: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold) I have watched since the pandemic started.

I would write more, but I have to shed my identity as Lee Winkelman, mild-mannered community organizer and blogger, and take up my secret identity as Sisyphus the dishwasher.

Triumphing Over Danger and Winning in the End

March 14, 2020 – The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1965) Amazon Prime

I find my self wanting to watch and read detective stories these days. I just read and loved Harlen Coben’s new book The Boy From the Woods and Lee Child’s old book One Shot, and I watched the Netflix show The Stranger based on a different Harlen Coben book. It is easy to see why detective stories are so comforting in this dangerous time. The detective is a figure who holds onto his moral certainty while triumphing over danger. Sam Spade starts off unsure who killed his partner, but he is always able to disarm the gunsel and uncover the truth, all the while holding fast to his determination that “I won’t play the sap for you.” Jack Reacher beats the odds again and again, defeating a half dozen or so armed Russian gangsters with only a knife and taking out the “puppet master” because “ he had a girl killed…so he deserves to have something come out at him.” The detectives in these stories are exceptionally competent at a time when we feel anxious and insecure; they overcome violent threats at a time when we feel overwhelmed by danger; they have a clear moral code when we are living in murky unclarity; they uncover the truth when we are unsure about what comes next. While there is usually loss in these stories, the detective triumphs over danger and wins in the end. I think at this difficult moment, we would all like to triumph over danger and win in the end.

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold is a spy story, not a detective story. There are similarities: a murky situation, life and death stakes, and the hero-spy who must act in the face of danger and uncertainty. Despite the similarities, this spy story – and perhaps all spy stories – is the inverse of the detective story in one key aspect. The detective has a moral code, but the spy has no moral code: the spy does whatever is necessary to protect their country. This film explicitly says that there is no difference between the spies of the “free” world and those of Soviet Block. Alex Leamas, the British spy in this movie, says: “What the hell do you think spies are? Moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They’re not! They’re just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: little men, drunkards, queers [sic], hen-pecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell, balancing right against wrong?” While the detective triumphs precisely because they hold fast to their moral code, the spy is defeated when they try to act from morals instead of expediency.

I really liked this film even though it deviated from what I like most about the detective story. It is well-acted by Richard Burton, Clair Bloom, and the other cast members, and it is well directed by Martin Ritt. I would like to say a word or two about the director Martin Ritt, who doesn’t get the attention and respect he deserves. There is a strong thread of politics – social criticism and morality – in his movies without them ever becoming didactic or preachy. I love his early movie Edge of the City (1957) which is an answer movie to On the Waterfront – a movie I love even if it is Elia Kazan’s justification for naming names. Edge of the City, featuring John Cassavetes, Sidney Poitier, and Jack Warden, is about a dock worker who confronts the corrupt gangsters directly, rather than cowardly naming names. After seeing this movie, it comes as no surprise that Ritt was blacklisted for his politics and was a former friend of Kazan. Ritt has made many other great movies: a partial list includes Hud, Sounder, The Front, and the beloved Norma Rae. Ritt is one of my favorite directors, and you can expect more of his movies to show up in this blog diary.