A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: A Life in Hollywood by Stanley Kramer, with Thomas M. Coffey Aurum Press 251pp, £16.95 in UK
This is autobiography of the most superficial kind. Very little of the man comes through, the main text being a kind of list-file of his thirty-four movies, with brief descriptions of how they came to be made, their content, stars, and outcomes once they opened. Stanley Kramer was born in Hell's Kitchen in New York in l913, just a few months before his father separated from his mother, leaving her with an infant son and very little money. Luckily, both for herself and her son, she got a job as a secretary with the New York office of Paramount Pictures. When he graduated from NYU, Kramer managed to wangle an internship in the movie industry. He journeyed to California and to Hollywood, where he was assigned to 20th Century Fox. It was as a producer that he saw his niche in life, and in no time at all he was producing his first film, a comedy called So This Is New York, with Henry Morgan and Rudy Vallee. It bombed, but he hit paydirt with his second, the boxing picture Champion, which featured an explosive performance from the newly emerging Kirk Douglas. After that he did Home of the Brave, a daring effort for 1949 because its plot centred around racism in the United States Army.
Home of the Brave was followed by The Men, a film about paraplegic war veterans that gave a first starring role to Marlon Brando. The account of the making of this provides the only really good movie story in the book. Brando, being a method actor, spent some weeks living in a wheelchair with real war victims. One night they all went to a local bar for a few drinks. During their sojourn, a woman religious fanatic came in and informed them that if they had faith they would be able to walk again. Getting tired of her ranting, Brando suddenly jumped to his feet with a cry of "I can walk, I can walk" and did a buck-and-wing across the floor. Kramer has always been known as an idiosyncratic film-maker, with many of his efforts regarded as "message" movies. Except for a painful couple of years at Columbia, when he was more or less under the thumb of the monstrous Harry Cohn, he retained his independence as a producer, a fact which enabled him to make films on controversial subjects. He got up the nose of the navy when he made The Caine Mutiny, then did likewise with the medical profession in his directorial debut, Not as a Stranger. Racial taboos were still very much in fashion in 1958 when he made The Defiant Ones, in which Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis were chained together as escaping convicts. Probably the one picture he is most remembered for is Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, which starred Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn as a liberal white couple whose daughter brings a black man home and announces that he is her fiancee. The fact that he is an affluent doctor and is played by the highly desirable and handsome Sidney Poitier took slightly from the shock, but the film was still a courageous one at the time. There is no doubt that, in a relatively short list of thirty-four, Kramer made a worthy stack of important movies.
Any producer/director has to be proud of pictures such as High Noon, Judgement at Nuremberg, The Wild One, Inherit the Wind, and, one of my own favourites, The Member of the Wedding. There is probably a more definitive biography of the man lurking around the corner, but in the meantime this rather skimpy volume will have to suffice. It does give some insights into the making of the films, but the man behind them remains in- substantial, a shadowy although powerful figure.
Vincent Banville is a writer and critic