Pioneering producer-director Stanley Kramer passes away

Pioneering producer-director Stanley Kramer passes away
Reuters

LOS ANGELES, FEB 20: Pioneering filmmaker Stanley Kramer, who directed some of Hollywood’s biggest names in socially conscious movies dealing with subjects like racism, the nuclear arms race and Nazi war crimes, died on Monday after a brief bout with pneumonia, his wife said. He was 87.Karen Sharpe Kramer said her husband of 35 years died at the Motion Picture Home, a retirement community for former Hollywood workers, in the Los Angeles suburb of Woodland Hills. “He went quietly and peacefully, as we all hope we may do,” she said.

Kramer was famous for his message films a term he hated and was one of Hollywood’s first independent producers, working outside the studio system by raising financing himself. Among his best-known pictures were The Defiant Ones (1958), starring Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier as escaped convicts; the anti-nuclear On the Beach (1959), starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner; Inherit the Wind (1960), about the right to teach evolution in public schools; and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), on the Nazi war crimes tribunal. Even his less serious fare contained social comment.In “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World” (1963), a 190-minute romp starring comics like Milton Berle, Jimmy Durante, Sid Caesar and Phil Silvers, characters race one another to buried loot while under surveillance by authorities calmly waiting for them to find it.

Kramer came of age during the Great Depression and lived through the New Deal reforms aimed at putting America back on its feet. “That probably had as profound an influence on me as any event on which I can base the things I believe in: my attitudes regarding the blacks; the freedom of teachers; world guilt and sectarian prejudice,” he once said. “I never became a evangelist because of those beliefs, but I tried to translate the drama of them into film.”

Although many of Kramer’s movies won Academy Awards in various categories, he himself never received an Oscar despite nine nominations, and he was generally dismissive of his output. “That’s my great defense against critics,” he said. ‘’I have been more critical of myself than the critics have.”

In later years, he described some of his films as “oversimplified,” particularly those dealing with the black experience in the United States.

Four actors who starred in films Kramer directed or produced won Oscars: Katharine Hepburn for the racial comedy-drama “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (1967), Maximilian Schell for “Nuremberg,” Gary Cooper for the Western classic “High Noon” (1952) and Jose Ferrer for the romantic fable “Cyrano de Bergerac” (1950).

Kramer’s last feature was the 1979 film “The Runner Stumbles,” about a parish priest (Dick Van Dyke) infatuated with a novice nun (Kathleen Quinlan). After it bombed, he moved with his wife and two young daughters to Seattle for seven years. He taught at the University of Washington and wrote a weekly column for the Seattle Times.

On returning to Hollywood, he developed several projects, including a biopic about Polish democracy leader Lech Walesa, a drama about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and a farce about the oil business, but none was ever produced.Stanley Earl Kramer was born in the Hell’s Kitchen section of New York on Sept. 29, 1913. One day after receiving a degree in business administration from New York University, he arrived in Los Angeles to break into the movie industry.He worked for several years at MGM and formed his ownproduction company in 1947. He released his first picture a year later, “So This Is New York,” an unsuccessful comedy starring Henry Morgan.

But he hit it big with his next two films, both released in1949. “The Champion” was a low-budget drama starring the relatively unknown Kirk Douglas as a prizefighter, while “Home of the Brave” dealt with anti-Semitism in the armed forces.

Other films included “High Noon,” starring Cooper as a sheriff abandoned by the townsfolk he must defend against thugs, and “The Wild Ones” (1954), a violent motorcycle gang drama starring Marlon Brando.

Deciding that he could better transmit his bold concepts as a creative producer by omitting the middleman, Kramer made his feature directing debut in 1955 with “Not as a Stranger,” a medical drama starring Robert Mitchum.

“The Defiant Ones” began an unbroken string of acclaimed films until the end of the 1960s. Kramer also dabbled in television projects and wrote his memoirs.