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Martin Ritt
Martin Ritt (March 2, 1914 – December 8, 1990) was an American director and actor who worked in both film and theater, noted for his socially conscious films. Some of the films he directed include ''The Long, Hot Summer'' (1958), '' The Black Orchid'' (1958), ''Paris Blues'' (1961), ''Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man'' (1962), ''Hud'' (1963), '' The Spy Who Came in from the Cold'' (1965), '' Hombre'' (1967), ''The Great White Hope'' (1970), '' Sounder'' (1972), ''The Front'' (1976), ''Norma Rae'' (1979), '' Cross Creek'' (1983), ''Murphy's Romance'' (1985), '' Nuts'' (1987), and ''Stanley & Iris'' (1990). Early career and influences Ritt was born to a Jewish family in Manhattan, the son of immigrant parents. He graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. Ritt originally attended and played football for Elon College in North Carolina. The stark contrasts of the depression-era South, against his New York City upbringing, instilled in him a passion for express ...
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The Black Orchid (1958 Film)
''The Black Orchid'' is a 1959 American drama film directed by Martin Ritt and starring Sophia Loren and Anthony Quinn. Supporting actors include Peter Mark Richman, Virginia Vincent, Frank Puglia, Jimmy Baird, Naomi Stevens, Whit Bissell and Ina Balin. Plot Rose Bianco (Sophia Loren), a florist widowed by a famous gangster, looks for happiness with widower Frank Valente (Anthony Quinn). Rose is dealing with her son Ralph in a work farm for troubled boys. Ralph is warned that if he runs away one more time he will be sent to reform school. Frank has a grown up daughter and only child Mary (Ina Balin), who takes care of everything for him. Mary is in love with a man named Noble, and they are engaged, but Mary hesitates to marry him because she is worried about who will take care of her father. She asks Noble to marry her and then stay with her in her father’s house, but Noble wishes to purchase a house near the location of his business in Atlantic City as he is tired of commuting. ...
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Santa Monica, California
Santa Monica (; Spanish language, Spanish: ''Santa Mónica'') is a city in Los Angeles County, California, Los Angeles County, situated along Santa Monica Bay on California's South Coast (California), South Coast. Santa Monica's 2020 United States Census Bureau, U.S. Census population was 93,076. Santa Monica is a popular resort town, owing to its climate, beaches, and hospitality industry. It has a diverse economy, hosting headquarters of companies such as Hulu, Universal Music Group, Lionsgate Films, and The Recording Academy. Santa Monica traces its history to Rancho San Vicente y Santa Monica, granted in 1839 to the Sepúlveda family of California. The rancho was later sold to John Percival Jones, John P. Jones and Robert Symington Baker, Robert Baker, who in 1875, along with his Californio heiress wife Arcadia Bandini de Stearns Baker, founded Santa Monica, which incorporated as a city in 1886. The city developed into a seaside resort during the late 19th and early 20th cen ...
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Golden Boy (play)
''Golden Boy'' is a drama by Clifford Odets. The play was initially produced on Broadway by The Group Theatre in 1937. Odets' biggest hit was made into a 1939 film of the same name, starring William Holden in his breakthrough role, and also served as the basis for a 1964 musical with Sammy Davis, Jr. Plot Joe Bonaparte, a young Italian-American man and talented violinist, dreams of becoming a professional musician. Joe, however, fights a boxing match for manager Tom Moody, which he wins. Joe's father, Mr. Bonaparte, has scraped up enough money to afford a top-of-the-line violin for Joe's 21st birthday. However, upon learning of Joe's fight from Joe's brother Frank, Mr. Bonaparte decides not to give Joe the violin. Two months later, Joe has become a successful boxer for Moody and Roxy Gottlieb, a prizefight promoter. However, Joe won't throw punches, attempting to protect his hands. Later, Joe prepares to go on a boxing tour, where Mr. Bonaparte presents Joe with the violin ...
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Elia Kazan
Elia Kazan (; born Elias Kazantzoglou ( el, Ηλίας Καζαντζόγλου); September 7, 1909 – September 28, 2003) was an American film and theatre director, producer, screenwriter and actor, described by ''The New York Times'' as "one of the most honored and influential directors in Broadway and Hollywood history". Born in Constantinople (now Istanbul), to Cappadocian Greek parents, his family came to the United States in 1913. After attending Williams College and then the Yale School of Drama, he acted professionally for eight years, later joining the Group Theatre in 1932, and co-founded the Actors Studio in 1947. With Robert Lewis and Cheryl Crawford, his actors' studio introduced "Method Acting" under the direction of Lee Strasberg. Kazan acted in a few films, including ''City for Conquest'' (1940). His films were concerned with personal or social issues of special concern to him. Kazan writes, "I don't move unless I have some empathy with the basic theme." His ...
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Group Theatre (New York)
The Group Theatre was a theater collective based in New York City and formed in 1931 by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg. It was intended as a base for the kind of theatre they and their colleagues believed in— a forceful, naturalistic and highly disciplined artistry. They were pioneers of what would become an "American acting technique", derived from the teachings of Konstantin Stanislavski, but pushed beyond them as well. The company included actors, directors, playwrights, and producers. The name "Group" came from the idea of the actors as a pure ensemble; a reference to the company as "our group" led them to "accept the inevitable and call their company The Group Theatre."Clurman, p. 51 The New York-based Group Theatre had no connection with the identically named Group Theatre based in London and founded in 1932. In the ten years of its existence, the Group Theatre produced works by many important American playwrights, including Clifford Odets, Sidney K ...
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Marxism
Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand Social class, class relations and social conflict and a dialectical perspective to view social transformation. It originates from the works of 19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. As Marxism has developed over time into various branches and schools of thought, no single, definitive Marxist philosophy, Marxist theory exists. In addition to the schools of thought which emphasize or modify elements of classical Marxism, various Marxian concepts have been incorporated and adapted into a diverse array of Social theory, social theories leading to widely varying conclusions. Alongside Marx's critique of political economy, the defining characteristics of Marxism have often been described using the terms dialectical mater ...
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Communist Party
A communist party is a political party that seeks to realize the socio-economic goals of communism. The term ''communist party'' was popularized by the title of ''The Manifesto of the Communist Party'' (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. As a vanguard party, the communist party guides the political education and development of the working class (proletariat). As a ruling party, the communist party exercises power through the dictatorship of the proletariat. Vladimir Lenin developed the idea of the communist party as the revolutionary vanguard, when the socialist movement in Imperial Russia was divided into ideologically opposed factions, the Bolshevik faction ("of the majority") and the Menshevik faction ("of the minority"). To be politically effective, Lenin proposed a small vanguard party managed with democratic centralism which allowed centralized command of a disciplined cadre of professional revolutionaries. Once a policy was agreed upon, realizing political goals req ...
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Communism
Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange which allocates products to everyone in the society.: "One widespread distinction was that socialism socialised production only while communism socialised production and consumption." Communist society also involves the absence of private property, social classes, money, and the state. Communists often seek a voluntary state of self-governance, but disagree on the means to this end. This reflects a distinction between a more libertarian approach of communization, revolutionary spontaneity, and workers' self-management, and a more vanguardist or communist party-driven approach through the development of a constitutional socialist st ...
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Federal Theater Project
The Federal Theatre Project (FTP; 1935–1939) was a theatre program established during the Great Depression as part of the New Deal The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1939. Major federal programs agencies included the Civilian Cons ... to fund live artistic performances and entertainment programs in the United States. It was one of five Federal Project Number One projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administration, created not as a cultural activity but as a relief measure to employ artists, writers, directors, and theater workers. National director Hallie Flanagan shaped the FTP into a federation of regional theaters that created relevant art, encouraged experimentation in new forms and techniques, and made it possible for millions of Americans to see live theatre for the first time. As a drama professor at Vassar college, Hallie ...
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Works Progress Administration
The Works Progress Administration (WPA; renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration) was an American New Deal agency that employed millions of jobseekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to carry out public works projects, including the construction of public buildings and roads. It was set up on May 6, 1935, by presidential order, as a key part of the Second New Deal. The WPA's first appropriation in 1935 was $4.9 billion (about $15 per person in the U.S., around 6.7 percent of the 1935 GDP). Headed by Harry Hopkins, the WPA supplied paid jobs to the unemployed during the Great Depression in the United States, while building up the public infrastructure of the US, such as parks, schools, and roads. Most of the jobs were in construction, building more than 620,000 miles (1,000,000 km) of streets and over 10,000 bridges, in addition to many airports and much housing. The largest single project of the WPA was the Tennessee Valley Authority. At its peak ...
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Porgy And Bess
''Porgy and Bess'' () is an English-language opera by American composer George Gershwin, with a libretto written by author DuBose Heyward and lyricist Ira Gershwin. It was adapted from Dorothy Heyward and DuBose Heyward's play '' Porgy'', itself an adaptation of DuBose Heyward's 1925 novel of the same name. ''Porgy and Bess'' was first performed in Boston on September 30, 1935, before it moved to Broadway in New York City. It featured a cast of classically trained African-American singers—a daring artistic choice at the time. A 1976 Houston Grand Opera production gained it a renewed popularity after languishing in the doldrums of the 1960s and early 1970s, and it is now one of the best known and most frequently performed operas. The libretto of ''Porgy and Bess'' tells the story of Porgy, a disabled black street beggar living in the slums of Charleston. It deals with his attempts to rescue Bess from the clutches of Crown, her violent and possessive lover, and Sportin' Life ...
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