Stanley Kramer

• Born: September 29, 1913
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: February 19, 2001
• Place of death: Woodland Hills, CA

Film producer and director

One of the earliest filmmakers to specialize in the investigation of social and political problems, Kramer demonstrated that such films could reach large audiences. Among his other innovations were bringing to the screen seven versions of Broadway plays and hiring stage actor Marlon Brando for his first Hollywood film.

Early Life

Stanley Kramer (KRAY-mur) was born in the section of New York City known as Hell’s Kitchen. His mother, Mildred, worked as a secretary in the New York office of Paramount Pictures. Of his father nothing is known. His mother and Kramer lived with her parents, who were Jewish immigrants from Poland. Kramer considered his grandmother, though uneducated, bright and modern. His grandfather retired early from a position as salesman in the garment industry. Kramer credited his grandparents with instilling traditional values in him. He revealed little about his early years, and there is no substantial research that could throw light on the first three decades of his life.

Anti-Semitism was common in his neighborhood. For protection he joined a gang that included other minorities, some of them African Americans. The gang’s behavior, Kramer admitted, was often improper, but although he had “close calls,” he was never arrested. He remembered remaining on the scene of property damage done by the gang, but he was not apprehended. The gang members did not steal, he insisted, for people in his neighborhood were not desperately poor, and those in need received help from the Democratic political machine.

Kramer excelled as a student, graduating from DeWitt Clinton High School and gaining admittance to New York University (NYU) at the age of fifteen. He majored in business, although he did not think of himself as a future businessman. While at NYU he wrote an essay that attracted a representative from Twentieth Century-Fox, who offered him a paid internship in Hollywood in 1933, the year of his graduation. For most of the 1940’s he performed various researching, editing, and writing tasks. He was learning the ways of the film industry but was not making headway toward a substantial career. Not until he served in the Army Signal Corps, making training films in World War II, did it occur to him that he might become a film producer.

Life’s Work

Kramer formed a company with Carl Foreman, and by 1949 they acquired the funds needed for a film called Champion (1949), in which young Kirk Douglas starred as a boxer. The same year Kramer produced Home of the Brave (1949), the first Broadway play that he made into a film. The play was about anti-Semitism, which Kramer had experienced in his boyhood, in the Army, and in Hollywood, but because he desired his hero to be visually as “different” as the character felt, he cast him not as a Jew but as an African American.

One of Kramer’s most famous and controversial productions was High Noon (1952). About this time the House Committee on Un-American Activities was attempting to prosecute suspected Communists in the film industry, and the film’s scriptwriter and director were among those targeted. Despite these and other problems with the film, it became one of Kramer’s great successes.

In 1954, Kramer’s film, The Caine Mutiny, based on Herman Wouk’s best-selling 1951 book, appeared. Kramer knew that he would need the cooperation of the United States Navy to make the film, but Navy officials initially objected because, they claimed, the Navy had never had a mutiny. Eventually, however, he acquired a naval officer as technical adviser. As in Home of the Brave, Kramer omitted consideration of anti-Semitism, prominent in Wouk’s depiction of Nazi officers.

Beginning in 1955, Kramer began to direct the films that he produced. In an early success, The Defiant Ones (1958), a black man and a white man, played by Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis, were prisoners chained together. When Kramer was invited to the Moscow Film Festival in 1963, the U.S. State Department objected to the use of The Defiant Ones because the Curtis character was a racist, but Poitier agreed to appear at the festival with Kramer, and the showing of the film became one of the high points at a time when the Soviet Union and the United States were striving to overcome the estrangement between the two superpowers.

Other controversial films included On the Beach (1959), which Kramer admitted was inferior to another film of that year, Hiroshima mon amour, directed by Alain Resnais, on the subject of atomic warfare. Even as a producer-director Kramer was forced to cast Hollywood stars, not his own choices, but Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner in On the Beach helped to attract a much larger audience than Resnais’s film enjoyed. Another controversial film was Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), in which Kramer found it necessary to cast Burt Lancaster (an actor he appreciated but not for that role) when Laurence Olivier was unavailable. This film also experienced opposition from the State Department at the time of the 1963 Moscow Film Festival because of its negative portrayal of Germans, who were at that time among international friends of the United States.

Asked about actors, Kramer confessed that he did not like them particularly. He found Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra uncooperative, but Kramer had great respect for the highly professional Spencer Tracy, who starred in Kramer’s productions of Inherit the Wind (1960) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (1967). In the latter racism is presented in an often humorous way, for the Tracy character must come to terms with a daughter who falls in love with an African American. Comedy prevails in only one Kramer work, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), a long, rambunctious film with dozens of stars.

Kramer produced and directed films until 1979 and did some teaching thereafter. He lived his last thirty-five years married to actor Karen Sharpe. From an earlier marriage he had one son and one daughter. The second marriage produced two more daughters. Kramer died of pneumonia at the age of eighty-seven in 2001.

Significance

Kramer was an unusual director in two ways: He produced films before he directed any, and in an era that avoided the portrayal of discrimination, hatred, and prejudice he specialized in such topics. He demonstrated the falseness of a prevailing view that audiences would not support films with a serious message. He addressed the topic of anti-Semitism only indirectly, although he had felt the force of it, both in childhood and adult life. Six of his films were nominated for best picture or best director or both, and participants in his films won numerous Academy Awards, although Kramer himself did not win any. In 1962, he won the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, given periodically to creative producers. Later criticism of his work sometimes charged him with being too absorbed in seeking popular success. His technical skill has been questioned, but critics generally recognize his initiative in investigating topics often thought too hazardous for the motion-picture screen.

Bibliography

Kramer, Stanley. A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: A Life in Hollywood. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997. In this book and in interviews Kramer revealed little about his early life and no details about his nearly decade-long activity in Hollywood before the war. The chapters focus on his best-known films and some of his unsuccessful ones. The book provides insight into his relations with coworkers.

Spoto, Donald. Stanley Kramer: Film Maker. New York: Putnam, 1978. This book is one of Spoto’s numerous biographies of Hollywood celebrities. Although it is valuable as a biography of Kramer, the author falls short of analyzing the ambivalence of his subject, for Kramer seemed both to seek artistry and to risk it by submitting unnecessarily to Hollywood formulas, especially with respect to casting.

Stevens, George, Jr., ed. Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age at the American Film Institute. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Stevens’s interview with Kramer focuses on the latter’s intentions, achievements, and difficulties as producer and director.