The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (353 page)

But if you hoped in those teen years that Ms. Ringwald was getting an education, and making proper plans for the future, then it’s a letdown to find how hard she is working in pictures and TV projects you’ve not heard of. She is still only thirty-three, and her titles often shriek with unintended irony:
Something to Live For: The Alison Gertz Story
(92, Tom McLoughlin);
Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade
(93, George Hickenlooper);
Face the Music
(93, Carol Wiseman);
The Stand
(94, Mick Garris); to France for
Tous les Jours Dimanche
(95, Jean Charles Tacchella) and
Enfants de Salaud
(96, Tonie Marshall);
Malicious
(95, Ian Corsen);
Baja
(95, Kurt Voss);
Townies
(96, Pamela Fryman);
Office Killer
(97, Cindy Sherman);
Since You’ve Been Gone
(98, David Schwimmer);
Twice Upon a Time
(98, Thom Eberhardt);
Teaching Mrs. Tingle
(99, Kevin Williamson);
Kimberly
(99, Frederic Golehan);
Requiem for Murder
(99, Douglas Jackson);
The Giving Tree
(99, Cameron Thor);
Cut
(00, Kimble Rendall);
In the Weeds
(00, Michael Rauch);
The Translator
(00, Leslie Anne Smith);
The Big Time
(02, Paris Barclay).

She works less often now:
The Tulse Luper Suitcases: The Moab Story
(03, Peter Greenaway); as a lawyer in
The Wives He Forgot
(06, Mario Azzopardi); and as a mother in the TV series
The Secret Life of an American Teenager
.

Rin Tin Tin
(1916–32), b. Germany
Deanna Durbin supposedly saved Universal, Mae West may well have saved Paramount, but the actor who saved Warners—he was known as “the mortgage lifter”—was the great and unique Rin Tin Tin. At the height of his career, Jeanine Basinger tells us in
The Silent Stars
, he received up to 12,000 fan letters a week, earned $6,000 a month, was insured for $100,000, and had his own valet, chef, limo, and driver. When he was discovered, there were other dog stars, most prominently Strongheart, but Rinty quickly eliminated him as competition. It may sound farfetched or campy, but when you watch his movies, everything becomes clear. First of all, they’re well made—full of action and feeling; but more important, Rinty is really talented. This was a dog who not only obeyed orders perfectly, performing amazing feats without a stumble (according to witnesses, he was a far quicker study than most biped actors), but who seemed to grasp the emotion of scenes and actions and then convey them. (He didn’t even look embarrassed when saddled with a mate, the charming Nanette.) And what other dog star could nimbly disguise himself with a beard or put on little boots? If you doubt all this, take a look at
Night Cry
(26) or
Jaws of Steel
(27).

Rin Tin Tin was a German shepherd discovered by an American soldier, Lee Duncan, in a German trench at the end of World War I and brought home to California. Quickly it became apparent just how biddable he was, and how photogenic. Duncan trained him, Warners snapped him up, and soon he was a huge moneymaker for them—and for Duncan, who controlled the career and the movies. He starred in feature after feature through ten years, even surviving the coming of sound (Rinty barks!), before succumbing at the age of sixteen. He was playing with Duncan outside his elaborate home when he fell to the ground. Jack Warner, with his exquisite sensibility, was to write: “Rinty’s heart was tired and old, the strength had long since ebbed from the massive shoulders and legs. He was barely able to crawl to his master’s side, and Duncan knew at once that no power on earth could help. He phoned across the street to his neighbor, the lovely shimmering Jean Harlow, and she came running. And she cradled the great furry head in her lap, and there he died.” Could Jack have been projecting?

Rinty, we can see in hindsight, was a kind of canine Shirley Temple—a failure-proof specialty act—and as Fox did for her, Warners provided him with strong production values and good actors in supporting roles, among them Louise Fazenda, Leila Hyams, Charles Farrell, Georgia Hale, and, in his last film, the serial
Lightning Warrior
(31), George Brent. Among his directors were Ray Enright and Malcolm St. Clair. After his death, there was a string of faux Rin Tin Tins in both movies and TV, but none of them was in his league.

By contrast, Lassie was a role (played by a pack of nervy collies). But Rinty was a star—and no other Shepherd could match him.

Michael Ritchie
(1939–2001), b. Waukesha, Wisconsin
1969:
Downhill Racer
. 1972:
Prime Cut; The Candidate
. 1975:
Smile
. 1976:
The Bad News Bears
. 1977:
Semi-Tough
. 1979:
An Almost Perfect Affair
. 1980:
Divine Madness
(d);
The Island
. 1983:
The Survivors
. 1985:
Fletch
. 1986:
The Golden Child; Wildcats
. 1988:
The Couch Trip
. 1989:
Fletch Lives
. 1993:
Diggstown; The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom
(TV). 1994:
Cops & Robbersons; The Scout
. 1995:
The Fantasticks
(not released until 2000, recut by others). 1997:
A Simple Wish; Comfort, Texas
(TV).

The son of a Berkeley professor, Ritchie went to Harvard and then into TV, where he worked on
Omnibus, Profiles in Courage, Dr. Kildare, The Big Valley
, and
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
, among other shows. Ritchie did a two-hour pilot for
The Outsider
, on the strength of which Robert Redford hired him to do
Downhill Racer
. It says as much about vanity and fulfillment in competition as the rest of his films put together, and as a debut it was the more striking for its view of implacability in Redford.
Prime Cut
is a failure, but a situation that a Fuller or even an Aldrich might have relished. It made Ritchie seem too genteel, too far from the flagrant identification with things larger than life called for by the subject.
The Candidate
has an undeserved reputation for political shrewdness; actually it is chaste with its half-baked homilies of disapproval. Its liberalism would prefer to do without politics—as if politics were any more corrupt or less essential than other parts of American life.

Smile
is sometimes called a satirical masterpiece. It seems to me only a series of sketches, the product of narrative reticence, cheap shots, and careless technique—few films have more obtruding mikes. The attitude toward characters is patronizing and fragmentary, and the superiority of the picture’s tone treats everyone as some kind of rascal or jerk. Only great affection for people could have redeemed its imagery, but Ritchie’s method is off the cuff and unfeeling. It is a journalistic film, skimming a story and ignoring the deeper possibilities. And like journalism, it settles for mockery as it pursues the facile path of recording foolishness.

The Bad News Bears
and
Semi-Tough
show a further coarsening, as showbiz formulae cloud over truth. The first is woefully short of parents, and it ends up as a movie pandering to kids. The latter rejects an unusual novel, submits to its own brutish male stars and their delusions of sophistication, and casually derides women, football, and alternative lifestyles without ever finding the grace or intelligence that makes disparaging comedy cleansing and useful. It is a symptom of Ritchie’s evasiveness that so few of his films fit clearly into American genres. That could be a way of praising him—with Altman, it is—but in Ritchie’s case there is no fresh territory claimed or explored, because no real risk has been taken.

Of Ritchie’s work in the 1980s, nothing need or should be said. There are passages that can only be observed in silence. But in the nineties, he bounced back:
Diggstown
was decent, while
The Positively True …
was his best work, a raging satire such as only TV attempts now. Indeed, Ritchie was moving towards cable TV: he actually did a documentary on Einstein for French TV and in 1999 he directed an episode of the series
Beggars and Choosers
. But
The Scout
(about baseball, with Albert Brooks) and
A Simple Wish
(with Martin Short) both did poorly. Ritchie was one of those many directors who deserved better things.

Martin Ritt
(1914–90), b. New York
1956:
Edge of the City/A Man Is Ten Feet Tall
. 1957:
No Down Payment
. 1958:
The Long Hot Summer; Black Orchid
. 1959:
The Sound and the Fury
. 1960:
Jovanka e l’Altri/Five Branded Women
. 1961:
Paris Blues
. 1962:
Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man
. 1963:
Hud
. 1964:
The Outrage
. 1965:
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold
. 1967:
Hombre
. 1968:
The Brotherhood
. 1969:
The Molly Maguires
. 1970:
The Great White Hope
. 1972:
Sounder
. 1973:
Pete ’n’ Tillie
. 1974:
Conrack
. 1976:
The Front
. 1978:
Casey’s Shadow
. 1979:
Norma Rae
. 1981:
Back Roads
. 1983:
Cross Creek
. 1985:
Murphy’s Romance
. 1987:
Nuts
. 1990:
Stanley and Iris
.

Ritt was himself an actor, playing in
Golden Boy
on Broadway and in
Winged Victory
(44, George Cukor). After the war, he taught at the Actors’ Studio and worked in TV as an actor and director. His debut was one of several mid-1950s graduations from small to large screen and, on the strength of his work with John Cassavetes and Sidney Poitier, it seemed to show some ability with naturalistic acting.

But the promise was illusory. Far from a realist, Ritt chose heavily literary originals, most of which got the better of him. His versions of Faulkner are shamefully dull, no matter how much Fox flinched away from the density of Yoknapatawpha County. He lurched from one bizarre subject to another: missing the essence of Hemingway and Le Carré; aping
Rashomon
in
The Outrage
, but only laboring with the variety of truths; skirting around the potential of
The Molly Maguires;
and making one of the silliest boxing movies.
Hombre
is a dull Western with a flashy script;
The Brotherhood
is a modest Mafia story that, one suspects, Mario Puzo never forgot.

Only
Hud
has touched on the early sense of raw lives uncovered. That is also a film full of good acting, even from Paul Newman, once Ritt’s pupil, whose decline owes a good deal to the way Ritt’s movies have indulged and wasted him.
Sounder
and
Conrack
revived the inane view of Ritt as a conscientious liberal. But the day when every young black is as delectable as Cicely Tyson is still far off; in his very first film, Ritt had done no more and no less to glamorize Sidney Poitier.

By his final years, it was hard to avoid the truth that Ritt made dull, amiable films (at his best).
Norma Rae
was his strongest picture, preaching to the converted and making the most of the drab cuteness of Sally Field, but an effectively righteous picture.
Cross Creek
had a pleasant rural mood, and a good performance from Alfre Woodard.
Murphy’s Romance
knew nothing but the adorability of James Garner and Sally Field. But
Nuts
was a misbegotten venture—with Barbra Streisand in the film it is likely that only her direction could have controlled the script.
Stanley and Iris
had pathos coming out of its ears.

Thelma Ritter
(1905–69), b. Brooklyn, New York
Thelma Ritter always seemed worn out. In a flower-print dress and flat shoes, her hair screwed up in a home perm, and her face like a used newspaper, she might have had a full day washing and cooking before she came to the studio, and a few hours’ office cleaning ahead of her as soon as she finished. It is a tribute to her sour inventiveness that such deep-grained tiredness never seemed boring, nor did her Brooklyn accent grate.

Quite the contrary, she is a treasured supporting player, immortalized in one brilliant scene from Samuel Fuller’s
Pickup on South Street
(53). In that film she plays a necktie saleswoman, wearying unto death of trudging round New York with her ties and patter. One night she returns to her cramped room and retreats to her bed. Fuller shows this in one steady shot that aches with the exhaustion of her long day and yet does not show, in the darkness beside her bed, a man waiting to kill her if she will not betray Richard Widmark. She does not appear to notice him, but Ritter has seen (or sensed) the man, guessed his purpose, and foreseen its conclusions. Thus, the shot gains enormously in pathos as she sees her tiredness drawing to a close. That shot says more about city life, and more poetically, than whole movies that assault the subject directly.

She had been an actress on stage and radio before her friend George Seaton asked her to play in his
Miracle on 34th Street
(47). Thereafter she became a fixture:
Call Northside 777
(48, Henry Hathaway);
A Letter to Three Wives
(49, Joseph L. Mankiewicz);
Father Was a Fullback
(49, John M. Stahl); Bette Davis’s dresser in
All About Eve
(50, Mankiewicz);
Perfect Strangers
(50, Bretaigne Windust);
The Mating Season
(51, Mitchell Leisen);
As Young as You Feel
(51, Harmon Jones);
The Model and the Marriage Broker
(51, George Cukor);
With a Song in My Heart
(52, Walter Lang);
Titanic
(53, Jean Negulesco);
The Farmer Takes a Wife
(53, Henry Levin); as the lady who comes in to scratch James Stewart’s back in
Rear Window
(54, Alfred Hitchcock);
Lucy Gallant
(55, Robert Parrish);
Daddy Long Legs
(55, Negulesco);
The Proud and the Profane
(56, Seaton);
Pillow Talk
(59, Michael Gordon);
A Hole in the Head
(59, Frank Capra);
The Misfits
(60, John Huston);
The Second Time Around
(61, Vincent Sherman);
Birdman of Alcatraz
(62, John Frankenheimer);
For Love or Money
(63, Gordon);
A New Kind of Love
(63, Melville Shavelson);
Move Over, Darling
(63, Gordon); and
Boeing Boeing
(65, John Rich).