The Front (1976)

The Front is a Woody Allen movie that wasn't written and directed by Woody Allen – in fact, this film predates Allen's big smashes with Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979) – but it's still Allen at the film's center, and the jokes feel very Allen throughout.

The Front is very, very good. It's funny for the first two acts, and then it turns serious. And Martin Ritt has directed it so well that the serious turn made perfect sense and didn't feel the least disruptive. The movie stays serious after that – it is a film about the blacklist, after all, but the screenplay is aces and Ritt's direction is excellent. Michael Murphy is great in a supporting role, but Zero Mostel is incredible. He's so perfect in this. And when, as the credits start to roll, each name says when he was blacklisted in the early 1950s, it brought tears to my eyes. The Front has a powerful ending, and if this romantic comedy stays lighthearted, it always takes its main topic seriously.

Paris Blues

I was super into Paris Blues. I've been thinking about the Method recently a little more than usual because I am reading Jane Fonda's autobiography My Life So Far (actually, since I'm audiobooking it, she's reading it to me). Fonda was a student of the method and she mentioned offhand some of Lee Strasberg's other students – Ben Gazarra and Newman and Joanne Woodward – and I thought oh yeah Woodward and Newman.

Paris Blues is a jazz movie from 1961. In many ways it is very slight. Woodward romances Newman, who is taciturn and difficult, but also fun-loving and smiley by turns. And Sidney Poitier walks around Paris with the luminous Diahann Carroll. The couples fall in love. The boys are jazz musicians and trying to make a go of their careers. Newman is trying to be a composer. Louis Armstrong appears a couple of times, most notably for an extended musical sequence that is absolutely delightful. But, as I say, the whole thing is pretty slight. The couples are in love, they fight, they're not in love anymore, they reunite. Carroll and Poitier fight about what we used to call "the race question" – Poitier likes living in Paris because Parisians are not even close to as racist as Americans are, his own country. Carroll argues that roots are important, and that the only way the nation is going to improve is if people stay and make waves and fight about it; running off to Paris isn't the answer.

Paris Blues fits in perfectly, then, with Martin Ritt's commitment to racial equality and issues of racism in his films, and the movie also ends with a beautiful, hard finish. I was really into it. I forget how much I love Martin Ritt's work.

The Briefest of Reviews from 1972

Pete 'n' Tillie is 1972 Oscar bait. Weird stuff, really. Walter Matthau and Carol Burnett are a strange couple who just sort of end up together. They have chemistry, but the whole thing is odd. And this is not primarily a comedy, despite the cute little n in the title. The film does pick up whenever Geraldine Page is on screen, and this does give it some delightful comic elements, but mostly this is a movie about a difficult marriage with rather a lot of "acting". There's a reason this movie is hard to get ahold of these days. I'm calling it Oscar bait because Matthau and Burnett, as comedians, are asked to be serious and deal with some family issues and real trouble, in what seemed to me a awards-season ploy to note the versatility of the performers. I'm not sure either is really up to the task here.

The Briefest of Reviews from 1970

Wow. Martin Ritt's The Molly Maguires is the undiscovered gem of 1970. Like Cromwell it stars Richard Harris and Frank Finlay, with additional superb performances from Samantha Eggar and (even more importantly) Sean Connery. The molly maguires are a gang of saboteurs who work in the coal mines of nineteenth-century America. They are exploited, beaten down, and killed by the men who run the mines, and so they fight back: violence with violence. Ritt's film is a smart one, but I also found it deeply moving. Henry Mancini's score is haunting and beautiful, and the filmmaking is excellent.

Hope, Whiteness, and James Earl Jones

I watched this a while ago, and I just wanted to share how much I really loved The Great White Hope. It's an old movie made from an even older play, but it's really excellent.

The Great White Hope also boasts some superb performances. James Earl Jones is just outstanding, and his later fame in other roles is completely obvious when looking at his work in this. He was already a master in 1970. The performance is big and brave and powerful.

I have to admit to being a little baffled as to why they didn't just call the character in the movie Jack Johnson. The Great White Hope is so clearly based on Johnson's life-story that it seems odd to provide any subterfuge. The film calls him Jack Jefferson, which makes the subterfuge seem even sillier to me.

One thing the fake name did do for me is that I kept asking "Did that really happen?" "They didn't do that to him, did they?" "They couldn't have ended up in Budapest performing in a production of Uncle Tom's Cabin could they have?" That's probably not all bad. I mean, I ended up looking Johnson up and spending an hour reading about him after the movie was over.

The Great White Hope is a boxing movie only partially. Much of the boxing happens off screen – a choice that would probably never be made by a filmmaker working today and probably a formal device left over from the original play – and instead the focus is on the ingenious methods these racist jackasses in the United States invented as a way of punishing Jack Johnson for being a powerful pugilist and for loving a white woman.

But TGWH is, even more than that, one of those 1970s lonely-man films of which I am so fond, where the protagonist's morals are questionable and when the film ends he goes off into an uncertain, confusing future, but faces that future with a characteristic unflappability and fortitude. TGWH is a character study and an absolutely fascinating one. The writing is also excellent, though as I noted above, it's often a little too stage-y.

Jane Alexander is also great in the movie, and TGWH also boasts a fierce performance by Network actress Marlene Warfield (god I love her) and an appearance from the amazing Beah Richards.

One more thing. I have watched two James Earl Jones movies recently (the other was 1974's Claudine, which I loved), and both appear in this hilarious mashup, which my friend Walt showed me this summer. Enjoy:

Martin Ritt Double Feature

I recently watched two Martin Ritt movies—Sounder and Cross Creek—and neither was very interesting.

Both films are about the South.

I am being unkind. Sounder is not that bad. At least the family dynamics in it are interesting, and it is also smart about racism—to a point. Sounder also boasts some very fine acting from Cicely Tyson, Paul Winfield, and delightful supporting cast. Still, the filmmaking is rather boring, distant, and always "epic" without ever earning it.

But Cross Creek is a boring mess. I have more to say about why, but it doesn't even really warrant it. What a snooze-fest! Sometimes white people can just be so boring! This movie is about author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, who learns about herself by moving to a backwoods part of Florida, exploiting (and being sentimental about) the local people, and writing about their earthiness. I mean who cares? I guess some people do, but I am not one of those people. Rip Torn gives rather an interesting performance in the film, but the rest of the movie is totally unremarkable.