Stanley Kramer's films, either as a director or a producer, held up a mirror to the society in which he made them. They were not always box-office successes, and they quite frequently earned him death threats from racists. At the time of their release, his films were picketed for being too "radical" and yet decades later would be criticized for not being progressive enough. Kramer knew he couldn't please everyone with his work, but he held to his principles and made the films he wanted to make.

Kramer was born on September 29, 1913, as he later wrote, "just a few months before my father separated from my mother, leaving her with an infant son and next to no money. Where we lived, Hell's Kitchen, was a notoriously rough slum on the west side of mid-Manhattan. I have no recollection of my father, and no one in my family ever spoke about him. My mother, the daughter of poor immigrant parents, had enough education to get a job as a secretary at the New York office of Paramount Pictures, still a fledgling company at the time....For most of my childhood, we lived with her parents. My grandmother cared for me while my mother was putting in extremely long hours at the office -- there were no eight-hour days or even two-day weekends at the time. Our Hell's Kitchen apartment was really a hole in the wall, dark and airless, it seemed always crowded, with four people living there. There were really only two bedrooms, one for my grandparents and one for my mother, so I lived in a little fenced-off area next to my mother's door, which was called my room."

Although his mother worked for Paramount, Kramer did not start out wanting to be a filmmaker. "The image of myself as a filmmaker was born in me gradually, I guess, after I experienced a stroke of luck just before I graduated from New York University in 1933, at the very depths of the Depression...What I wanted was to be a writer, and during my fours years at NYU I had made several stabs at it. A couple of my stories had even been accepted by campus publications, encouraging me to send a third story to a panel of Hollywood studio representatives engaged in choosing five new graduates for what I understood to be an internship in the movie industry. I was chosen as one of the five and departed for California within a week after my graduation." Kramer was sent to Twentieth Century-Fox where he was given a job moving furniture around sets. "At the end of three months, each of the interns wrote some material, which I doubt anyone read, and were summarily dismissed. The other four headed straight back to New York, but I didn't have enough money for train fare. I had to get a job."

His solution was to get all his money and go to the Santa Anita racetrack, where he bet it all on a horse - and won. Kramer was able to stay in Hollywood and got another job moving furniture at studios while he shopped around his screenplays. One of which, Stunt Girl he sold to Republic Pictures but it was never made. Finally, Kramer got a job as an assistant to producers Albert Lewin and David Loew at their independent production company. The job didn't last long because in 1943, he was drafted into the army. With Lewin's help, Kramer was able to get assigned to an army film unit stationed in Long Island, where he made training films. On his release, he found it difficult getting back into Hollywood so he decided that he would become an independent producer and make his own films. His first, a comedy called So This Is New York (1948) was a disaster, but his second, Champion (1949), was a major success and helped launch the career of Kirk Douglas. It was an exposé of the corruption of the boxing world, which Kramer had seen firsthand. Friends of his from Hell's Kitchen had become boxers and were often cheated out of their money by managers and promoters.

Kramer wanted to not only entertain but educate his audience, just as he would in his later films. "As I reached early manhood during the Depression, I was also developing a social awareness that influenced my thinking about many things. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's election in 1932 brought with it a new liberal philosophy quite different from the big-business-oriented, conservative Republicanism of Herbert Hoover. The New Deal, with its social legislation, was really a better deal for most Americans. Roosevelt's whole aim was to give the average person a greater share in society and to take care of those who couldn't take care of themselves. This represented an innovation in our government. I agreed enthusiastically with almost every bit of it, and its influence remained very much within me throughout my film career. When I made pictures about economic strangulation, cynical medical practices, or racial integration, Roosevelt was in the front of my mind. He was ahead of his time not only on Social Security, rural electrification, and working conditions, but in his concern for the welfare of all Americans, including blacks. All of this had a tremendous influence on me, not only on which films I made, but on the way I made films and the reasons I made them."

The success of Champion and his follow-up films Home of the Brave (1949) and The Men (1950), was his ticket into the big studios. Kramer was approached by several studios, but chose to work for Columbia. In 1952, while he was still working on High Noon (1952), he signed a contract to produce eleven films at the studio. During that time he was able to branch out into freelance directing at other studios, like MGM, where he made his directorial debut with the medical drama Not as a Stranger (1955), starring Olivia de Havilland, Frank Sinatra and Robert Mitchum. When his contract at Columbia was up, he happily left. Kramer realized that he needed more creative control and worked best as an independent.

It is perhaps as a director, rather than a producer, that Stanley Kramer is best known. Certainly films like The Defiant Ones (1958) , On the Beach (1959), Inherit the Wind (1960) and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) bear the unmistakable Kramer stamp as they touch on social issues like racism, the threat of nuclear war, religious extremism, and the aftermath of Nazism.

The 1960s would be Kramer's last decade as a major director. With the exception of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), his films were not pulling in the box office numbers necessary in the evolving business climate in Hollywood. During the 1970s, he would work mainly in television. His last film, The Runner Stumbles was in 1979. Stanley Kramer died on February 19, 2001.

Sidney Poitier wrote in the foreword to Kramer's autobiography, A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World: A Life in Hollywood, "Such image as courage now has in the Hollywood of today is owed in no small measure to the handful of men like Stanley Kramer who stood fast in difficult days and aligned themselves with those values by which they conducted their lives as men, as husbands, as fathers, as citizens, and as artists. Men who came to town with expectations. Men who arrived fully ready to accept as a given that they would have to swim against the tide sometimes. The life's work of Stanley Kramer is a testament to courage, to integrity, honesty, and determination. Had he not elected to swim against the tide when the currents were sometimes at their strongest, we would not have had the opportunity to experience the cinematic impact of such thought-provoking and memorable films as Judgment at Nuremberg; On the Beach; High Noon; Inherit the Wind; The Defiant Ones; Guess Who's Coming to Dinner; Home of the Brave; The Men; It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World and numerous others."

by Lorraine LoBianco

SOURCES:

A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World: A Life in Hollywood by Stanley Kramer with Thomas M. Coffey.

www.wsws.org

Wikipedia.org

The Internet Movie Database

BBC News