A Voice in the Choir: The Activist Filmmaking of Martin Ritt (Preview)
by Peter Biegen

In an early scene in Hud (1963), the title character and his nephew, Lonnie, dunk their heads in a water trough to try to sober themselves after another Friday night of small-town mayhem. Beneath the surface of this rough camaraderie lies a devastating truth: years earlier, after a similar night of carousing, Hud drove drunk and killed his passenger—his brother, Lonnie’s father. Bonding, in such a family, is fraught. It requires setting aside caution and pride, a brief willingness to be seen as flawed. That fragile connection is broken by the arrival of the family’s moral center, Homer Bannon—Hud’s father and Lonnie’s grandfather—the man who carries the family’s deepest wound. He despises Hud’s influence on Lonnie but, more painfully, he admits that he never liked his own son. “You live just for yourself,” he says, “and that makes you not fit to live with.”

Hud’s reply is both self-pitying and true, a small shard of fatal honesty: “My mother loved me, but she died.” It’s hard for Lonnie to watch such unguarded poison; although, at this point in the film, Hud’s self-defense may have seemed performative. Hud was, after all, manipulative, and Lonnie was the audience for both men. In retrospect, Lonnie becomes us: the audience then and now, wanting Hud to be great and loud and rebellious—everything Lonnie was still afraid to be. Everything many of us remain afraid to be.

Hud confronts Homer with an unimpeachable truth about trauma—one that doesn’t excuse his behavior but demands empathy for it. Lonnie finally argues that Hud is not so different from every other headstrong cowboy in town. “That’s no cause for rejoicing, is it? Little by little, the country changes because of the men we admire.”

Homer’s words carry the quiet authority of experience and the sadness of a man watching moral gravity lose to charisma. It’s a moment that distills the ethical anxiety at the center of Martin Ritt’s cinema—the recognition that public virtue decays when we reward charm over conscience. Ritt spent his career contesting that decay. From Hud through Hombre (1967), Sounder (1972), The Front (1976), and Norma Rae (1979), his films form a single argument about the social cost of moral abdication and the stubborn dignity of those who refuse it.

Yet, in today’s film culture—more inward, aesthetically self-conscious, and politically diffuse—that kind of voice has gone missing. The “choir” of American cinema still sings, but few voices rise from within the mainstream to challenge its complacencies. Ritt’s example reminds us of what it meant, once, for a film to confront rather than merely depict, to nourish conscience as well as appetite. That confrontation between moral conviction and public indifference was no abstraction for Ritt; it was biography. The same system that rewarded charm and obedience once silenced him for conscience.

Martin Ritt came up in the kind of theater that mistook rehearsal for revolution. The Group Theatre in 1930s New York wasn’t just a stage company; it was a moral experiment. Poverty outside, purpose inside. Everyone smoked, argued, believed. Ritt stood in those rooms—a tall kid with boxer’s shoulders and a quiet face—absorbing everything: Harold Clurman’s sermons about collective responsibility; Lee Strasberg’s obsession with emotional truth; Clifford Odets hammering out plays that made hope sound like a union demand. Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing! (both 1935) were call sheets for the conscience. Ritt watched it all, learned that performance could be a form of protest if you believed hard enough.

It was the Depression, but they carried themselves like apostles. Realism was their religion. And Ritt, who never confused glamour with meaning, found his faith there. The politics came naturally. If you believed people mattered, you were already on a list. He joined marches for workers, spoke up for civil rights before the phrase had market value, signed petitions that seemed righteous at the time and dangerous later. There’s no hard proof he ever carried a Communist Party card, but he carried the associations—the conversations, the friendships, the idealism that aged badly once the Cold War began.

By the late 1940s, he’d moved from stage to radio, then to television. At CBS, he directed episodes of Danger and You Are There—the kind of programs that took the country’s pulse seriously. He was efficient, tough, dependable. The kind of man networks love right up until they don’t.

Then came the chill. In 1952, Counterattack, a weekly anticommunist newsletter and publisher of Red Channels, printed his name. Just like that, the doors closed. No hearings or subpoenas. Just silence. One week he was on the CBS lot; the next he was radioactive. They said it wasn’t personal—that catchphrase of bureaucratic cowardice. But Ritt knew better. The Blacklist didn’t need proof, just rumor. His friends disappeared first, then the paychecks. He taught acting to survive. Did odd jobs. Read the newspapers and saw his colleagues confessing or renouncing or begging for work. He refused to play the part. Those years marked him. He called them embittering but clarifying—a kind of moral X-ray that showed who stood and who folded. In interviews he’d later say, “The Blacklist taught me integrity.” What he meant was that it stripped everything else away…

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Peter Biegen is a screenwriter and playwright who has written for The Letter Review, PopMatters, Chicago Story Press, The Opinion Pages, and Bright Lights Film Journal.

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Cineaste, Vol. LI, No. 2