In 1928, frustrated newspaper reporter Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (Oscar winner Mary Steenburgen) leaves her husband and career and moves in an isolated orange grove in the Florida bayou to concentrate on writing fiction. But here in this strange and untamed land, Marjorie will find her life changed forever by a devoted servant (Alfre Woodard) who becomes her friend, a local businessman (Peter Coyote) who becomes her lover and the backwoods father (Rip Torn) and his young daughter (Dana Hill) who become her greatest inspiration. Cross Creek is based on the best-selling memoirs of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Yearling. Directed by the legendary Martin Ritt (Sounder, Norma Rae), the film became the sensation of the 1983 Cannes Film Festival and remains one of the most powerful portraits ever of a writer’s search for fulfillment as well as the remarkable story of one woman’s bold struggle for independence. —amazon.com
American film director Martin Ritt started out as a Broadway actor. Ritt’s stage role as “Gleason” in Winged Victory brought him to Hollywood for the film version, for which the studio publicity billed him, along with the rest of the male cast, by the rank he held in the Army (Private First Class Martin Ritt). A victim of the Hollywood blacklist, Ritt’s career came to a standstill in the early 1950s. He reemerged, not as an actor, but as a director for the 1956 film Edge of the City. A favorite of actor Paul Newman, Ritt directed Newman in The Long Hot Summer (1958), Paris Blues (1961), Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man (1962), Hud (1963), The Outrage (1964) and Hombre (1967). Other Ritt-directed films of note were Pete ‘n’ Tillie (1972), Cross Creek (1984), Murphy’s Romance (1985), and, his last film, Stanley and Iris (1990). If there doesn’t seem to be a central throughline in these films it was because Ritt steadfastly refused to be typecast as a director. One project that brought… read more
