The noted screenwriter and producer, whose parents were respectively an immigrant rabbi and a Hebrew school teacher, passed on at Cedars Sinai on Sunday at age 89, the day after Yom Kippur ended. He and his wife, Harriet Frank, who survives him, wrote some of the best screenplays of their day set in the then-contemporary American west, including “Hud.”
The over 20 filmed screenplays by Frank and Ravetch weren’t fancy, they were just, for the most part anyway, good. A couple of scenes illustrating that point, one famous, the other less so.
If these scenes are new to you, the first clip is from “Hud” (1963) the second is from “Murphy’s Romance” (1986), Frank and Ravetch’s underrated penultimate filmed screenplay, both directed by another underrated talent, Martin Ritt.
I’m rather fond of this quote from the NYT obituary I linked to above:
“Movies can’t correct human injustice all by themselves, but they can show it, they can touch you while showing it, and they can seed ideas and wake up dormant minds,” Mr. Ravetch said. “For a medium that began — pretty much in my early childhood — as a few flickering images on a nickelodeon machine, that’s pretty powerful stuff.”
