USA
Shown in 1970
CREDITS
- dir
-
Martin Ritt
- prod
-
Laurence Turman
- scr
-
Howard Sackler
- cam
-
Burnett Guffey
- cast
-
James Earl Jones, Jane Alexander, Hal Holbrook, Robert Webber, Marlene Warfield, Moses Gunn, Beah Richards, Lou Gilbert
- source
-
Twentieth Century Fox
OTHER
The grand success of Howard Sackler’s play, The Great White Hope, both in its original Washington, D.C. presentation and the subsequent Pulitzer prizewinning Broadway run, made it clear that historic confrontations of Negro versus white protagonists truly mirror the agonizing social tragedies of America. The irony is total: that in the world of sports, the symbolic nature of such conflicts is inescapable, and their denouements, the most cruel. The saga of the first black heavyweight champion in American boxing is the heart of the matter in this film, and The Great White Hope is a landmark in the dramatization of the ignoble depths into which the highest ideals can be plunged, because of the blight of racial prejudice. In retrospect, those years before WWI might be labeled the "age of innocence" by some, but today one recognizes the rigid stereotypes regarding black people which were so solidified in the consciousnesses of Americans during that era. The film recreates the period with observant brilliance, and the startling effectiveness of the leading roles, played by the original stars from Broadway, James Earl Jones and Jane Alexander, is intensified by the camera’s unstinting imagery. The epic nature of the background in the life of Jack Jefferson (the fictional name for Jack Johnson) becomes a sociological document that forcefully clarifies one celebrity’s difficulties in maintaining personal dignity and self-respect when the taboo of miscegenation stared his public in the face. Across the barriers of ignorance, however, this particular story underlines the admirable simplicity of human love between two people who are out-of-time, helplessly deafened by the slanders of both races and who, beyond the cheering of crowds, mutely consign themselves to fate and the conformity of death.
—Albert Johnson
FACTOID #125
According to the November 29, 1959 San Diego Union, The Village on the River was the first Dutch feature ever shown in the U.S. (at the Third San Francisco International Film Festival).
