Who's Almost Who In Knickerbocker Village History: Martin Ritt

above in 1958 directing Ina Balin in Black Orchid

Born In NYC and in 1920 I found him at 140 E. 7th Street, right across the street from Tompkins Square Park. His father was a union organizer thus the strong attraction to Norma Rae

Martin Ritt (March 2, 1914–December 8, 1990) was an American director, actor, and playwright who worked in both film and theater. He was born in New York City. 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. 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 then went to work with the Roosevelt administration's New Deal Works Progress Administration as a playwright for the Federal Theater Project, a federal government-funded theater support program.
With work hard to find and the Depression in full effect, many WPA theater performers, directors, and writers became heavily influenced by the radical left and Communism, and Ritt was no exception. Years later, Ritt would state that he had never been a member of the Communist Party, although he considered himself a leftist and found common ground with some Marxist principles.
Ritt moved on from the WPA to the Theater of Arts, then to the Group Theater of New York City. It was at the Group Theater that he met Elia Kazan. Kazan cast Ritt as an understudy to his play Golden Boy. Ritt’s social consciousness and political views continued to mature during his time with the Group Theater, and would influence the social and political viewpoint that Ritt would later express in his films.
During World War II, Ritt served with the U.S. Army Air Forces and appeared as an actor in the Air Forces' Broadway play and film Winged Victory. During the Broadway run of the play, Ritt directed a production of Sidney Kingsley's play Yellow Jack, using actors from Winged Victory and rehearsing between midnight and 3 a.m. after 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.
After working as a playwright with the Works Progress Administration, acting on stage, and directing hundreds of plays, Ritt became a successful television director.
In 1952, Ritt was acting, directing, and producing teleplays and television programs when he was caught up by the Red Scare and investigations of communist influence in Hollywood and the movie industry. Although not directly named by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Ritt was mentioned in an anti-communist 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 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.
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, 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 is a virtual laundry list of themes influencing Ritt over the years: corruption, racism, intimidation of the individual by the group, defense of the individual against government oppression, and most notable, the redeeming quality of mercy and the value of shielding others from evil, including sacrificing one's own reputation, career, and even life if necessary.
Ritt went on to direct 25 more films.
Ritt's 1964 film The Outrage, is an American retelling of the Kurosawa film Rashomon, and stars Laurence Harvey, Paul Newman, Claire Bloom, Edward G. Robinson, Howard Da Silva, and William Shatner. The film uses the Western genre to tell the same story as the Japanese movie. Like the original Kurosawa film, this film contrasts the stories of various witnesses to a crime. Shatner and Robinson listen to four different versions of a rape/murder, told alternatively by Harvey, Bloom, Newman and Da Silva. Harvey is the one murdered, but tells his story through an Indian medicine man. Each story is a biased opinion of what happened, and the movie never resolves which story is true (if any). Like the Kurosawa original, Ritt's film is an example of nonlinear storytelling.
In 1976, Ritt made the one of the first dramatic feature films about the blacklist, The Front, starring Woody Allen. The Front satirizes the use of front men, 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.
In 1987, Ritt again utilized extensive flashback and nonlinear storytelling techniques in the film Nuts, a film about a strong-willed, high-class call girl (Barbra Streisand) who kills a customer in self-defense. To avoid scandal, her parents try to have her declared mentally incompetent. Not helping matters is that she is distrustful of everybody, including her court-appointed attorney (Richard Dreyfuss), and is disruptive during her court hearings. The movie is based on a stage play by the same name, written by Tom Topor. The film was considered a box office disappointment in relation to its budget, although it did not actually lose money.
* Edge of the City (1957)
* The Long Hot Summer (1958)
* Hud (1963)
* The Outrage (1964)
* The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1965)
* Hombre (1967)
* The Great White Hope (1970)
* The Molly Maguires (1970)
* Sounder (1972)
* The Front (1976)
* Norma Rae (1979)
* Murphy's Romance (1985)
* Nuts (1987)
* Stanley and Iris (1990)