Make the Case: 5 Best John Ritter Movies

Make the Case lists choices chronologically, rather than in any order of quality. Picks reflect film acting roles only. If the actor in question also directed the movie, that’s purely a coincidence, and it plays no part in the film’s inclusion.

Let’s be honest: In terms of the films themselves, the late, criminally underappreciated John Ritter’s career in movies is rather spotty.

There is a lot of garbage to sift through, particularly after Ritter became intensely associated with television. For good or ill, Three’s Company seemed to define much of the work he would get afterwards. Ritter preserved, surviving a typecasting nightmare that followed him around for a number of years. Even when public perception turned on Three’s Company, with the consensus being that it was a weird artifact from an artificial decade, Ritter continued to work.

Between the end of Three’s Company’s run, and his too-goddamn-soon passing in 2003 at the age of 54), Ritter worked in television at an exhaustive pace. Go through the 80s, 90s, and the early 2000s, and you won’t find a shortage of memorable, often comic performances. He worked as a guest star fixture for much of his career, occasionally starring in solid shows like Hooperman and Hearts Afire). At the time of his death, he was winning over just about everyone who saw him as the lead on 8 Simple Rules. Occasionally, his TV work extended into the dramatic. Stephen King’s It is the one you probably just thought of, but there are other examples to be found. On the other end of the spectrum, his natural friendless made him a great fit for Clifford the Big Red Dog.

Even before Three’s Company, Ritter showed up in some of the most popular shows of the 1970s. The list includes Hawaii Five-O, The Waltons, M*A*S*H, The Bob Newhart Show, Mannix, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Barnaby Jones, The Streets of San Francisco, and more.

On television, Ritter was so reliable, as someone who could deliver a distinctive performance, audiences seemingly took it for granted. Faces like Ritter just seem to give us the impression that they’re going to be around forever. This is the downside for actors/actresses who are quietly, consistently good at their craft. We usually don’t think about how good they really are, until they have already died.

His film career, again, isn’t quite as much fun to get through. Yet while many of the films he appeared in ran the gamut from okay-to-dear-god, there are some genuinely good movies in the bunch. More importantly, even in the dreck, there was more often than not a sincere, sometimes sublime performance from John Ritter.

I would argue that there are even moments in which Ritter was peerless in his time, place, and profession. His death at such a young age, and under such wretched circumstances, robs us of the chance to better define what he was truly capable of.

Personally, I think we lost one of the best of his generation.

 

1. Americathon (1980)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqYoB6BLOMw

Made during the height of Three’s Company’s success, Americathon is not a very good movie. It wasn’t very popular upon its release, and it has not aged particularly well in the present. Still, the movie has a weird energy that’s hysterical and deeply depressed at the same time. That can appeal to a very specific brand of humor, particularly since the movie also has to get over the challenge of making a very feeble idea (a telethon to save an oil-starved, terminally broke America) last for eighty-six minutes.

The movie’s few bright spots come largely from the performances. As President Chet Roosevelt, Ritter is as funny as his character is unlikable. I honestly don’t know if we’re supposed to like President Chet, but I know for a fact that I like the way Ritter chose to play a vapid, earnest, relentlessly optimistic impression of America as a physical presence. It is broad comedy for a broad satire, but Ritter’s energy and enthusiasm maintain your interest, long after everything falls off.

 

2. Problem Child (1990)

Again, we are not talking about a great film by any stretch of the imagination. The story of a horrible little boy looking for a family, while drifting through life with a psychotic desire to hurt others, is presented with a cartoonish tone that is almost suffocating, if you are over the age of, say, 10. I loved these films as a child, but they have not held up very well for me.

Once in a while, nostalgia and boredom kick in, and I’ll at least put on the first film in what eventually became a dreadful franchise. For me, a movie like this can only hold up for as long my nostalgia. With the Problem Child films, I can make it through the first one. At this point in my life, I can appreciate the talent it takes on Ritter’s part to not only remain the film’s most entertaining aspect, but to also find the closest thing this movie has to something that feels vaguely human. Ritter brought that to a lot of mediocre projects. Clearly, it seems as though he believed in everything he did, and every character he played. Even in dreck like this.

 

3. Stay Tuned (1992)

I feel a little bad for focusing, however unintentionally, on John Ritter giving great performances in shitty movies. I wouldn’t call Stay Tuned shitty, even if its attempts at morality (the movie goes on at great length about the consequences of being addicted to TV) are horribly ham-fisted and largely unnecessary. Stay Tuned is sort of like a longer episode of HBO’s Tales from the Crypt, although the atmosphere of this film isn’t nearly as malevolent.

Alongside another familiar, underrated actor who worked primarily in television (Pam Dawber), Ritter is hilariously frantic and misguided, yet extremely determined, as a man who has to survive a TV satellite dish that has been designed to kill him with its programming, and take his soul to hell. Sure. Why not. The movie is largely a series of hellfire-inspired parodies of TV shows, movies, and the occasional societal trend/opinion. Ritter is a perfect victim for something like this, but he plays the character with a stubbornness that makes him a little more than a dupe to suffer the torments of the dammed.

Best of all, for the most part, the movie in of itself, directed by Hyams, with an animated segment by the legendary Chuck Jones), is actually pretty entertaining, even likable.

 

4. Noises Off (1992)

Easily the best of the films John Ritter did with the largely overrated Peter Bogdanovich, Noises Off meanders on its play-within-a-play concept, but it’s worth watching now for a long list of appealing comedic performances. Ritter isn’t the star, but he could lend something to almost any ensemble, and he could do that in almost any role. He’s doing it here as a flakey, 3rd rate theater actor, and it plays well against actors like Michael Caine, Carol Burnett, Christopher Reeve, and Denholm Elliot (in his final film appearance). It just would have been nice to see this film get a better director. Beyond that, Noises Off! Is yet another reminder of Ritter’s low-key talents, and it deserves the cult status it has obtained over the years.

 

5. Sling Blade (1996)

Back when Billy Bob Thornton was just another redneck with a weird, almost Charlie Brownian-head, he played a supporting role in Ritter’s amiable early-mid 90s sitcom Hearts Afire. Their friendship resulted in the two working together several times, including Bad Santa, which would be John Ritter’s final film.

Sling Blade propelled Billy Bob Thornton to Oscars and fame. Sling Blade remains perhaps the most personal project of Thornton’s to date. There is a sense of deep care in every aspect of the film that Thornton worked on. It sounds like he was involved in much of the movie’s production, particularly since he both wrote and directed the movie, in addition to playing its tragic lead. I have to imagine Thornton had Ritter in mind for a part early on. Thankfully, he cast Ritter in a role quite unlike nearly the whole of his career. In most of the projects he worked on over the years, Ritter was often cast as likable, sympathetic men. Even the ones who weren’t very likable were usually just stuck with the common sin of being an ignorant asshole.

Sling Blade has him as a sympathetic character, a gay coworker and friend of a woman and mother (Natalie Canerday), trapped in a violent relationship with an abusive, all-too-real depiction of a heartbreakingly common monstrosity. Ritter appeared in several dramas throughout his career. Some of them are quite good (It is a good example). Sling Blade might be the best of the bunch. It casts Ritter in a role considerably different from most of the other men he played. Ritter is quietly memorable, and his performance adds another layer of relatability to the movie. He doesn’t play Vaughn Cunningham as a weak human being. He plays Vaughn as someone who is very tired of being forced to live life in a certain fashion, all because of the casual cruelty of others. Vaughn isn’t afraid. He simply wants to get through his life as quiet as possible. His heart is one of the purest in this very unhappy story, and it is one of the best arguments we have that Ritter could do a lot more as an actor than many gave him credit for.