Martin RittFilmography

Stanley & Iris

Crew: Director

Actors: Jane Fonda, Robert De Niro, Swoosie Kurtz, Martha Plimpton, Harley Cross

Synopsis: In this socially conscious drama with romantic overtones, Iris (Jane Fonda) is a working mother with a job at a large commercial bakery who is still getting over the death of her husband, though her circumstances don't give her much time to grieve. She's sharing her house with her two children Read More

Nuts

Crew: Director

Actors: Barbra Streisand, Richard Dreyfuss, Maureen Stapleton, Karl Malden, Eli Wallach

Synopsis: High-priced hooker Barbra Streisand has been arrested for the murder of one of her clients. The attorney engaged by Streisand's parents hope to cop an insanity plea so that she can avoid a trial and manslaughter conviction. But she refuses this, citing a proviso in New York law that may result in Read More

50 Years of Action!

Actors: Stanley Ackerman, Woody Allen, John A. Alonzo, Warren Beatty

Synopsis: One of the few documentaries to shine a spotlight on directors in Hollywood, this informative film sketches out the 50-year history of the Directors Guild of America. Formed at a time when people were still fighting for unions in the United States, the guild also had its problems when the studios Read More

Murphy's Romance

Crew: Director, Producer

Actors: Sally Field, James Garner, Brian Kerwin, Corey Haim, Dennis Burkley, Georgann Johnson

Synopsis: Newly divorced Emma Moriarty (Sally Field) moves herself and her young son to a small Arizona town, hoping to establish a horse farm. Town pharmacist Murphy Jones (James Garner), the town's most eligible bachelor, develops a platonic friendship with Emma, but he decides to keep his distance when Read More

The Slugger's Wife

Actors: Michael O'Keefe, Rebecca De Mornay, Martin Ritt, Randy Quaid, Cleavant Derricks

Synopsis: This routine film should have been called the "rock singer's husband" because it is about the life of a baseball player affected by his love for a singer. Darryl Palmer (Michael O'Keefe) plays for the Atlanta Braves, and when he walks into a nightclub and sees an attractive woman singing (Rebecca DeMornay Read More

Cross Creek

Crew: Director

Actors: Mary Steenburgen, Rip Torn, Peter Coyote, Dana Hill, Alfre Woodard

Synopsis: Director Martin Ritt's bucolic rural environments of Norma Rae, Conrack, and Sounder, are re-visited once again in Cross Creek, based on author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' memoirs of her times on a remote Florida bayou. Mary Steenburgen plays Rawlings, author of The Yearling, who, in 1928, makes the Read More

Back Roads

Crew: Director

Actors: Sally Field, Tommy Lee Jones, David Keith, Miriam Colon, Michael Vincente Gazzo

Synopsis: For his follow-up to 1979's Academy Award-winning Norma Rae, director Martin Ritt re-teams with that film's star, Sally Field, for this gritty romantic road comedy. Reportedly Ritt's homage to Frank Capra's films of the 1930s, Back Roads stars Field as Amy Post, a no-nonsense prostitute in the Read More

Norma Rae

Crew: Director

Actors: Sally Field, Beau Bridges, Ron Leibman, Pat Hingle, Gail Strickland, Barbara Baxley

Synopsis: Norma Rae finds Sally Field cast in the title role, a minimum-wage worker in a cotton mill. The factory has taken too much of a toll on the health of Norma Rae's family for her to ignore her Dickensian working conditions. After hearing a speech by New York union organizer Reuben (Ron Leibman) Read More

Casey's Shadow

Crew: Director

Actors: Walter Matthau, Alexis Smith, Robert Webber, Murray Hamilton, Andrew Rubin

Synopsis: Cajun quarter-horse trainer Lloyd Bourdelle (Walter Matthau) struggles to eke out a decent living for himself and his three sons Buddy, Randy and Casey (Andrew A. Rubin, Stephen Burns and Michael Hershewe). Their prize horse is thoroughbred foal Casey's Shadow, named after the youngest son (Hershewe Read More

The Front

Crew: Director, Producer

Actors: Woody Allen, Zero Mostel, Herschel Bernardi, Michael Murphy, Andrea Marcovicci

Synopsis: The McCarthy-era "witch hunts" in the entertainment industry set the stage for this comedy drama set in the 1950s. Howard Prince (Woody Allen) is a cashier at a corner bar who works as a small-time bookie on the side, with little success. One day, Howard's old friend Alfred Miller (Michael Read More

Hollywood on Trial

Actors: John Huston, Edward Dmytryk, Albert Maltz, Ring Lardner, Jr., Lester Cole, Dalton Trumbo, John Howard Lawson, Joseph McCarthy

Synopsis: Combining familiar newsreel footage with freshly shot material, David Helpern's Hollywood on Trial is a documentary concerning the "communist witch-hunt" era. In the years following World War II, several ambitious Washington politicos were anxious to dissipate the last traces of Roosevelt's New Read More

Der Richter und sein Henker

Actors: Jon Voight, Jacqueline Bisset, Martin Ritt, Robert Shaw, Helmut Qualtinger

Synopsis: Actor Maximillian Schell functioned as coproducer and director of End of the Game. Conversely, director Martin Ritt is the leading actor in this existentialist crime story. Ritt plays Hans Barlach, a Swiss police inspector who has spent 30 years trying to pin the murder of the woman he loved on Read More

Conrack

Crew: Director, Producer

Actors: Jon Voight, Paul Winfield, Madge Sinclair, Tina Andrews, Antonio Fargas

Synopsis: Jon Voight stars in this story, based on fact, about a teacher determined to make a difference in the lives of his students. In the late 1960s, Pat Conroy (Jon Voight) is given a teaching position on a small island off the coast of South Carolina. Conroy discovers that the school is little more Read More

Sounder

Crew: Director

Actors: Cicely Tyson, Paul Winfield, Kevin Hooks, Carmen Mathews, Taj Mahal

Synopsis: Martin Ritt's big-screen adaptation of William H. Armstrong's Newberry Award winning novel, Sounder stars Cicely Tyson, Paul Winfield, and Kevin Hooks as a black family struggling through life in depression-era Louisiana. The Morgan family is poor, but close. Young son David (Hooks) enjoys hunting Read More

Awake and Sing!

Synopsis: Walter Matthau stars in this made-for-TV adaptation of Clifford Odets' classic stage drama (which became one of the inaugural production of the famed Group Theater in the mid-'30s). The Berger family are an extended Jewish family living in the Bronx who are struggling to survive in the face of Read More

Pete 'n' Tillie

Crew: Director

Actors: Walter Matthau, Carol Burnett, Geraldine Page, Barry Nelson, René Auberjonois

Synopsis: Based on Peter DeVries' novel Witch's Milk, Pete 'n' Tillie stars Walter Matthau and Carol Burnett in the title roles. Middle-aged when they first meet, eternally joking Pete and repressed "old maid" Tillie don't immediately hit it off. Gradually, their friendship deepens into love and culminates Read More

The Molly Maguires

Crew: Director, Producer

Actors: Sean Connery, Richard Harris, Samantha Eggar, Frank Finlay, Anthony Zerbe

Synopsis: This grim historical drama from director Martin Ritt was loosely based on real-life events. Richard Harris stars as James McParlan, an operative for the Pinkerton Detective Agency in 1876. The Pinkertons have been hired by a major coal company to infiltrate and expose an underground terrorist Read More

The Great White Hope

Crew: Director

Actors: James Earl Jones, Jane Alexander, Lou Gilbert, Joel Fluellen, Chester Morris

Synopsis: Although the characters' names were changed, The Great White Hope was a thinly veiled account of the trials and tribulations of boxer Jack Johnson, based on the play by Howard Sackler and directed by Martin Ritt. James Earl Jones stars as boxing great Jack Jefferson, who defeats Frank Bardy Larry Pennell Read More

The Brotherhood

Crew: Director

Actors: Kirk Douglas, Alex Cord, Irene Papas, Luther Adler, Susan Strasberg

Synopsis: In Martin Ritt's The Brotherhood, Kirk Douglas plays Frank Ginetta, an old-line Mafioso who resents the newer policies encouraged by his younger brother Vince (Alex Cord). Frank resists all attempts at modernizing his operation, whereupon Vince cajoles his father-in-law Dominick Bertolo (Luther Adler Read More

Hombre

Crew: Director, Producer

Actors: Paul Newman, Fredric March, Richard Boone, Diane Cilento, Cameron Mitchell

Synopsis: Yes, Paul Newman is a blue-eyed Indian in Hombre, but this apparent ethnic error is carefully justified in the body of the story. Newman plays a white man who was raised by the Apaches, and ever since has straddled two worlds, feeling truly comfortable in neither. While riding a stagecoach, Newman Read More

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

Crew: Director, Producer

Actors: Richard Burton, Claire Bloom, Oskar Werner, Sam Wanamaker, George Voskovec

Synopsis: Based on the novel by John Le Carre, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold stars Richard Burton as a dispirited, end-of-tether British secret agent. He comes in from "the cold" (meaning he is pulled out of field operations) to act as a undercover man behind the Iron Curtain. To make his staged Read More

The Outrage

Crew: Director

Actors: Paul Newman, Laurence Harvey, Claire Bloom, Edward G. Robinson, William Shatner

Synopsis: Derived from the classic 1951 Japanese film Rashomon, director Martin Ritt's The Outrage attempts to modernize the original story of rape and murder, transporting from medieval Japan to the American Southwest of the 1870's. The story is told within the framework of three men waiting at a railway Read More

Hud

Crew: Director, Producer

Actors: Paul Newman, Melvyn Douglas, Patricia Neal, Brandon de Wilde, John Ashley, Whit Bissell

Synopsis: Having been burned by compromises to censors on his earlier films Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth, Paul Newman decided to star in as uncompromising a property as he could find. That property was Hud, inspired by a portion of Larry McMurtry's novel, Horseman Pass By. Hud Bannon (Newman Read More

Adventures of a Young Man

Crew: Director

Actors: Richard Beymer, Diane Baker, Corinne Calvet, Paul Newman, Ricardo Montalban, Fred Clark, Dan Dailey

Synopsis: The "official" title of this film is Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man; its screenplay is adapted from semi-autobiographical "Nick Adams" stories written by Ernest Hemingway. Played by Richard Beymer (West Side Story), Nick Adams is a young Michigan boy who sets out in the early 1900s to learn Read More

Paris Blues

Crew: Director

Actors: Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Sidney Poitier, Louis Armstrong, Diahann Carroll

Synopsis: The second film of director Martin Ritt with both Paul Newmanand Sidney Poitier, it's set in a city that has long been a haven for black musicians eager to escape the racism of the U.S. Newman is Ram Bowen, a trombone player who makes his living in a jazz group, which also includes tenor man Eddie Read More

Five Branded Women

Crew: Director

Actors: Silvana Mangano, Vera Miles, Barbara Bel Geddes, Jeanne Moreau, Carla Gravina

Synopsis: Once branded himself by the House Un-American Activities Committee, award-winning director Martin Ritt focuses on the cruel branding of five women in this standard wartime drama. Some of his better-known films (The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, Norma Rae) also deal with the question of social and Read More

The Sound and the Fury

Crew: Director

Actors: Yul Brynner, Joanne Woodward, Margaret Leighton, Stuart Whitman, Ethel Waters

Synopsis: In this filmed adaptation of William Faulkner's seminal work, Yul Brynner stars as Jason Compson, the oldest son of a once-proud Southern family rife with inner turmoil. His promiscuous sister, Caddy (Margaret Leighton), has suddenly rolled back into town with an illegitimate daughter called Read More

The Long, Hot Summer

Crew: Director

Actors: Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Anthony Franciosa, Orson Welles, Lee Remick

Synopsis: While often regarded as one of America's greatest novelists, William Faulkner produced work that did not always translate well to the screen; it's ironically appropriate that this movie, based on several of Faulkner's short stories, is often regarded as one of the best films based on his work Read More

The Black Orchid

Crew: Director

Actors: Sophia Loren, Anthony Quinn, Mark Richman, Ina Balin, Virginia Vincent, Frank Puglia

Synopsis: The title is Black Orchid, but the leading lady is a rose--florist Rose Bianco, played by Sophia Loren. Newly widowed, Rose holds herself responsible for the death of her husband, a well-known gangster. Anthony Quinn plays a widower who falls in love with Rose, much to the dismay of his daughter (Ina Balin Read More

No Down Payment

Crew: Director

Actors: Joanne Woodward, Tony Randall, Jeffrey Hunter, Sheree North, Cameron Mitchell

Synopsis: A handful of suburban couples discover that emotional turmoil lurks behind the placid exterior of the planned community of Sunrise Hills in this drama based on the novel by John McPartland. David and Jean Martin (Jeffrey Hunter and Patricia Owens) find their relationship starting to crumble after Read More

Edge of the City

Crew: Director

Actors: John Cassavetes, Sidney Poitier, Jack Warden, Kathleen Maguire, Ruby Dee

Synopsis: Edge of the City is a modern morality play, acted out in the railyards of New York. AWOL soldier John Cassavetes takes a job as a railroad worker, where he is taunted and bullied by supervisor Jack Warden, a union functionary appointed by the Mob. Cassavetes befriends his African-American Read More

Winged Victory

Actors: Mark Daniels, Lon McCallister, Don Taylor, Jo Carroll Dennison, Red Buttons, Edmond O'Brien, Geraldine Wall

Synopsis: Moss Hart's hit Broadway play Winged Victory was brought to the screen in 1944, with most of its original cast intact. The story, concerning regular Joes from all walks of life joining the Army Air Force, is secondary to such theatrical setpieces as a camp show wherein several virile Hollywood Read More