Word: film
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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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...
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...
Twentieth Century Fox probably decided to finance the film to the tune of $8 million because of the burgeoning black film audience (and audience which rarely has the opportunity to see the creations of black directors). However, Richard Zanuck might also have realized that in its essential "past-ness," the play is a suitable vehicle for white exorcism. Fox may thus have a box-office winner every bit as salable as last spring's fence-straddler, Patton...
...film does, however, seem somewhat healthier than the play as written (contrary to current belief). And this is despite the fact that in every plastic sense, Ritt is a perfectly lousy director. Some of the scenes are indistinguishable from those taped on stage for the Ed Sullivan show. When Ritt wants the audience to know that a crowd is present, he frames a few hundred thousand people cheering. Period. When he wants to emphasize the "frail nobility" and "still small voice" of a group of blacks praying for Johnson before the stadium in Reno, he sticks them in what suddenly...
...novel written after World War I. Now, in the face of the continuing Indochina War, New Left novelists sense a receptive audience and the antiwar literature is growing. Pacifist and radical filmmakers, too, have been busy. though their products do not reach a large audience. Only one major American film. The Ballad of the Green Berets, has been made about the Vietnam war, and its message follows the traditional shoot-em-up outline of cowboy and Indian movies...