Director whose films challenged social injustice

Although he hated the expression "message picture", Stanley Kramer, who died on February 19th aged 87, spent most of his career…

Although he hated the expression "message picture", Stanley Kramer, who died on February 19th aged 87, spent most of his career countering critics who attacked him for his wishy-washy liberal sentiments, and for tackling huge themes with inadequate artistic means.

After a tough childhood in the Hell's Kitchen district of New York, he took a degree in business administration at New York University. At 21, he got a job as an assistant writer at 20th-Century Fox, moving on to become apprentice senior editor at MGM. He became a production assistant on So Ends Our Night (1941), about three people forced to flee the Nazis in 1937. Prejudice, in all its forms, would become a central theme of his work. During the war, he joined the US army signal corps, and helped make training films.

He then set up his own production company, its first film being So This Is New York (1948), an unusual and amusing comedy directed by Richard Fleischer and based on Ring Lardner's novel The Big Town. The following year, he started to make his reputation as one of the most enterprising and successful independent producers by making economical, but serious, films just outside the Hollywood mainstream. In fact, he was more instrumental than any other independent producer in breaking the stranglehold of the major studios, thus giving the film industry a shot in the arm.

The two films that set him on his way were both directed by Mark Robson and written by Carl Foreman: Champion (1950), a powerful study of ruthless ambition, starring Kirk Douglas as a boxer who gets his comeuppance, and Home Of The Brave, which courageously took on the subject of racial prejudice in the US army.

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In 1950, he became even more prominent with Cyrano de Bergerac, an effective showcase for Jose Ferrer's Oscar-winning performance, and The Men, an uncompromising film starring Marlon Brando as a former GI paralysed from the waist down. This was followed by a faithful screen version of Arthur Miller's poignant play, Death Of A Salesman (1951).

A year later came two Zinnemann-directed pictures - Member Of The Wedding, an excellent transposition of Carson McCullers's novel about adolescence, and High Noon, probably the high-water mark of the careers of Stanley Kramer as producer, Zinnemann as director, Foreman as writer and Gary Cooper as actor.

He went on to produce The Wild One (1953), with Brando starring and Laszlo Benedek directing and a year later The Caine Mutiny.

It was in 1955 that Stanley Kramer decided to direct his own productions, something he did in a heartfelt but rather heavy-handed manner, keeping a shrewd eye on both the boxoffice and the Oscar donors. His first was the torpid hospital drama Not As A Stranger (1955), with Robert Mitchum acting as if under anaesthetic. He then spent $5 million on The Pride And The Passion (1957), a few cents of which could have been spent on a pair of scissors and a red pencil.

The Defiant Ones in 1958 was an advance on Hollywood's usual treatment of racial themes. About two bigoted convicts - one black (Sidney Poitier), one white (Tony Curtis) - chained together during a prison escape, it won five nominations and two Oscars for the screenplay and cinematography. In all, Stanley Kramer's films won 15 Oscars in various categories and one for lifetime achievement.

Inherit The Wind (1960) was about the famous "monkey trial" of 1925, in which a US schoolteacher was tried for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution. The well-staged battle that takes place in the stifling courtroom came down to a struggle for acting honours between the underplaying Spencer Tracy and the overplaying Fredric March.

Stanley Kramer then tackled Judgment At Nuremberg (1961), dealing with the 1948 trial of four Nazis accused of crimes against humanity. For 190 minutes, the arguments were shouted across the court, calmly presided over by Spencer Tracy, who has the last, self-righteous word in the matter. Stanley Kramer next paid a gigantic homage to slapstick comedy with It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). The film impressed cumulatively with its vast roster of comedians, past and present, its sheer size, and the number of spectacular stunts.

Ship Of Fools (1965), an adaptation of Katherine Anne Porter's hefty novel, weighing in at 148 minutes, made the best of an excellent cast, including Vivien Leigh in her final screen role and Jose Ferrer as an anti-semite. Guess Who's Coming To Dinner (1967), about a liberal, white middle-class couple coming to terms with their daughter's wish to marry a black man, provided an ideal vehicle for Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy to co-star for the last time.

Stanley Kramer was never able to repeat his huge triumphs of those earlier decades. The wartime comedy, The Secret Of Santa Vittoria (1969), was too long and loud, and with RPM (1970), he failed to catch the momentum of student revolution.

Undaunted, in Bless The Beasts And Children (1971), Stanley Kramer addressed the issue of endangered species, but it was the producer-director who was identified with disappearing buffalo. After The Runner Stumbles (1979), about a priest (Dick Van Dyke) falling for a nun (Kathleen Quinlan), failed at the box office, he decided that "somewhere between films on outer space and [Sylvester] Stallone, there was no place for me".

He left Hollywood for Seattle, where he wrote a weekly column for the Seattle Times. "I felt that after being half a step ahead for many years, I was suddenly half a step behind," he said. "This helped me catch up again."

Stanley Earl Kramer: born 1913; died, February 2001