#conrack

[tcm]

Jon Voight and Paul Winfield in CONRACK ('74)

[jozefsquare]

Conrack movie poster with excellent photo artwork.

title: Conrack | USA, 1974

director: Martin Ritt

with: Jon Voight, Paul Winfield, Madge Sinclair

poster design: Karel Machálek, 1974

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[gotankgo]

«A selection of fine films screening at ABC Great States theaters in The Loop fifty years ago today: The Super Cops at Chicago, Thomasine & Bushrod opens at Roosevelt, Conrack in its last week at United Artists, The Three Musketeers at Michael Todd, and The Exorcist was still going strong at Stat-Lake.»

[davidwatchedthat]

1/9/24

CONRACK, directed by Martin Ritt, 1974.

[kevrocksicehouse]

The big liberal heart of Martin Ritt started beating 107 years ago today. A few of his films:

Sounder (1972). A simple story of a depression era sharecropper family whose father, Nathan (Paul Winfield) is arrested for stealing a ham. His wife Rebecca (Cicely Tyson) sends the oldest boy David Lee (Kevin Hooks) to visit him. He fails, but on the way home comes across a school whose teacher invites him to attend. Sometime later (in one of the most painfully joyous reunions cinema has given us) Nathan returns, injured and insists David Lee attend the school even though he’s needed on the farm. In a heartbreaking scene he tells the son “You lose some of the time what you go after but you use all of the time you don’t go after.” As good a film as I’ve ever seen.

Conrack (1974). Ritt tells the story of Pat Conroy (who would later write The Great Santini and The Prince of Tides) when he was a teacher assigned to South Carolina’s Yamacraw Island, an isolated impoverished area and his attempts to overcome years of neglect and try to light the merest spark amongst the children. Ritt directs Jon Voight and the children unsentimentally but vividly and without turning the story into a white savior narrative, tells a story, not of victory but of the satisfaction that can come of fighting the good fight.

Norma Rae (1979). Ritt saw something in Sally Field that others didn’t, and as a mill worker with a gossip-worthy past, who is recruited by a union organizer (Ron Liebman), she gives a peerless performance of a woman finding her strength as she goes along. Ritt catches the feel of a crowded factory, and the ways its management manipulated the workers to stifle dissent. And the scene where Norma holds up a sign saying “Union” is iconic for the right reasons. Her triumph comes from beginning the fight.

[kevrocksicehouse]

Jon Voight, who turns 82 today, got his start playing…liberals.

Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy. D: John Schlesinger (1969). As a dim would-be hustler who is a deer in the headlights of 1960s Manhattan, Voight is set up to a pathos milking machine, but he is very smart at playing dumb and he gives his naïve optimism an ironic spin (“I ain’t a f’real cowboy. But I am one helluva stud!”) especially when he befriends a crippled lowlife (Dustin Hoffman) who becomes his manager. Their barely closeted closeness made this the gayest Best Picture Oscar Winner until Moonlight, and that the Best Actor award Voight should have won went to John Wayne was one of those jokes pop culture plays on itself now and then.

Pat Conroy in Conrack. D: Martin Ritt. (1974). Voight shines in this Idealistic Teacher story based on Pat Conroy’s “losing season” trying to teach children in an underfunded school on an isolated South Carolina island. It’s not often that movies allow a hero to be high-minded without  being revealed as a fool or a fraud but Voight teaching kids who’ve barely heard music before (“Visitors are going to come here expecting stupidity and poverty and you’re going to look those people straight int the eye, and exclaim ‘Are you perchance familiar with the works of Rimsky-Korsakov?’ We’ll knock their socks off.”) turns liberal utopianism into a grand quixotic quest.

Luke Martin in Coming Home. D: Hal Ashby (1978). Coming Home was one of the first movies to try to deal with the fallout of the Vietnam war and Voight’s performance as a paraplegic veteran dealing with guilt and trauma (“I have killed for my country, or whatever, and I don’t feel good about it. Cuz there’s not enough reason to feel a person die in your hands, or to see you best buddy get blown away”) deservedly won him an Oscar.

[thatsdeepyo]

On the outside of every men’s room door is the word ‘gentlemen,’ I’ll tell you what that means. A gentleman treats his fellow man with respect for his person and for his dignity. He doesn’t slander his religion, his color, or his pecker

Conrack 1974

[channeljal-blog]

Rune (8): The Viking in The Dumbwaiter Stormin' the gates!!!