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 Sidney Poitier, left, and Tony Curtis run for their lives in Kramer's "The Defiant Ones," a classic "message" picture. |
Memories of talks with
a filmmaking giant
of TheColumnists.com
When I first interviewed
Stanley Kramer in 1970 he was still riding high as Hollywood’s
foremost "message" director.
Such huge box office (and critical) hits as "The Defiant
Ones," "Inherit The Wind," "Judgment At Nuremberg"
and "Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner" had given him
a reputation as the most liberal of American film directors.
He remained a New Dealer through and through, he proudly told
me, although he never ventured farther afield into leftist political
concerns.
But by the time I interviewed him a second time in 1989 his reputation
was in steep decline and he knew it. For one thing a long retirement
in Seattle took him out of the movie making mainstream.
And there were those continuing pot shots from critics like Pauline
Kael of The New Yorker.
Born in New York city in 1913, Kramer graduated from New York
University at 19 and joined MGM’s research department where
he became first an editor and then worked on screenplays without
credit.
When I met him the second time he was back in production with
offices on Sunset Boulevard. But no future films resulted after
several years of trying to round up funds. He suggested we meet
across the street at a Hamburger Hamlet and when we shook hands
(he said he remembered the 1970 interview in Toronto) he definitely
seemed to have shrunk physically. The resemblance to his old
pal Spencer Tracy was startling.
Here are highlights of our two conversations:
JIM BAWDEN: When did you know you’d wind up as a director?
STANLEY KRAMER: I thought it was where I’d be best. I’d
"been a film editor, writer and then I became associate
producer on "So Ends
our Night" (1941) and "The Moon and Sixpence" (1942). On both of them I had great teachers: John
Cromwell and Albert Lewin. So I was slowly working my way up
when a little something called World War II came along. Back
in L.A. I joined with Carl Foreman, Sam Katz and George Glass
for the company Screen Plays Inc. I produced "So This is New York"
(1948), a box office flop; "Champion" (1949) and "Home
of the Brave" (1949), both directed
by Mark Robson, and fairish at the box office and "The Men"
(1950), which introduced Marlon Brando to movies. "Cyrano de Bergerac" (1950) was a shoestring production that won Jose
Ferrer an Oscar and I was on my way.
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Two Classic Stanley Kramer films starring two acting icons: Kirk Douglas. left, in "Champion" (1949), and Marlon Brando in "The Wild One" (1954)
Then Columbia came along with an offer for my own unit–30 movies in five years. They were hardly the “B”s the history books claim. I now think of them as the first art house features, very European in conception and subject matter, but Harry Cohn didn’t know how to sell them--they didn’t fit as double bill fodder which is what he wanted. "Death of A Salesman" (1951) got Oscar nominations but it was just awful–no way Fredric March resembled Arthur Miller’s conception of Willy Loman, no way!
I produced (uncredited) "High Noon" (1952) and that blew the lid off the old style western. Jack (John) Ford and Howard Hawks positively loathed it. You want to know about the Hollywood blacklist, how it worked? Watch "High Noon."
I produced for Fred Zinneman again: the film version of "The Member of the Wedding" (1952). A heck of a lot of talent went into it. It’s very lovely and very weird and nobody went to see it. On the stage at a distance the whole thing worked but close ups destroyed that illusion.
My last two for Harry were "A" flilms: "The Wild One" (1953) with Marlon Brando and "The Caine Mutiny" (1954), directed by Eddie Dmytryk. Watching Eddie direct (Humphrey) Bogart I was jealous. I wanted to do that. We delivered a three hour picture to Cohn who slashed an hour out of it so theatre owners would have more showings per day and he wrecked it. Somewhere in the Columbia vaults that great picture must still exist, maybe somebody will find it someday? But the experience taught me I had to direct as well as produce. So I signed a contract with United Artists.
JB: Why begin your directing career with "Not As A Stranger" (1955), an outright soap opera?
SK: I needed a surefire hit, so I picked the best selling novel by Morton Thompson. And then I hired Edna and Edward Anhalt to do the screenplay. Look at the cast and the billing: Olivia de Havilland demanded and got first billing but she hadn’t made a picture in a few years. Bob Mitchum lobbied to play the intern with Frank Sinatra asking to be cast as best friend. Sinatra third billed? He’d won a supporting Oscar but he was still in the rebuilding phase of his career. Gloria Grahame, another Oscar winner, was our resident femme fatale. She put Kleenex under her top lip because she thought that was sexy. And I had a stable of old hands: Broderick Crawford, Lon Chaney, Charlie Bickford, Myron McCormick. I don’t think this was a standard soap. It had some very important themes: How a surgeon forgets his humanity, the true goals of medicine versus the chase for wealth.
Olivia and Bob most definitely did not hit it off. His lackadaisical style can be off putting. He really didn’t warm to Frankie either. Both Bob and Frankie were 38, hardly ideal as young interns in the early scenes but it found a ready audience and we had a robust hit to start the new association with United Artists.
JB: You used Sinatra again in "The Pride and The Passion" (1957), again billed third, but this one was a box office disappointment.
SK: Ouch! I knew you’d mention that one. Started with a cracker of a novel "The Gun" by C.S. Forester and the Anhalts delivered a first rate picture. This is the one where Cary Grant really fell heavily in love with Sophia Loren (in real life)--and who wouldn’t? Even Frankie was smitten. But a movie about the Peninsular Wars during the Napoleonic era was not the first choice of film fans.
Cary was uneasy from the start–had to chuck all his Grantisms and he found Frankie annoying. I still grimace at the stills of Frankie with bangs–he looks like Jane Wyman, if you ask me. We had to close the set for months in Spain because of cast illness. My heart just wasn’t in it. I tried to deflect everything with the romance which really was there. Cary would kid me about this one for years after–he claimed turning down the Alec Guinness part in "The Bridge on The River Kwai" just for this. It cost over $4 million because of cost overruns and it didn’t make much coin at all.
JB: Did you see "Inherit The Wind" on the stage?
SK: Yes and I was impressed with Melvyn Douglas and Ed Begley but they were not big enough names to carry a courtroom drama. Originally Paul Muni had been in it but hadn’t made a movie in a decade, I think. No, I told the United Artists board only Spencer Tracy and Fredric March would do. After all, they’d been American film’s greatest adversaries for decades, both had double Oscars. If Spence was a bigger movie star, Freddie had just finished "Long Day’s Journey Into Night" on Broadway in triumph. A lot of historical research went into every aspect of the production. We built the town square on the lot from scratch because we needed the authenticity of a true Twenties Southern town.
Of course Spence had to play the Clarence Darrow-type attorney Henry Drummond. And Freddie would be Matthew Harrison Brady, the facsimile of the great orator William Jennings Bryan. The boys were generally on best behavior because they so respected each other. But look closely and you’ll see every time Tracy starts a long speech March is furiously fanning his brow in the background to distract the audience. March really went to the edge of caricature as the bellowing, verbose Biblical defender. It was quite a turn. Tracy by contrast was all small moments until the moment he loses his temper. And then--whoosh!--his fury is exciting to watch. At the first preview you could hear a pin drop.
We premiered it back in Dayton, Tennessee, site of the trial. An older woman who’d watched the trial as a young girl said it was all wrong, that most of it took place out on the lawn because of the blistering heat. But what can one do? It’s a film about the clash of ideas and they are still being debated today. Spence got the Oscar nomination much to March’s chagrin but this is a case of two great actors making each other look good, if Tracy had walked away with it there would have been no tension, no reason to sit until the end. I also think highly of Gene Kelly as the H.L, Mencken character here named E.K. Hornbeck. The story has spawned TV versions, stage revivals, but it’s a very difficult piece to get just right. I remember a (1965) Hallmark TV version with (Melvyn) Douglas and it was so hurriedly made the impact wasn’t always there.
JB: Was The Defiant Ones (1958) another of your message pictures?
SK: I hate that term. Pauline Kael was forever after me for directing stories about messages but that’s what attracted me. But this one got me the New York Film Critics Circle award and my first Oscar nomination as director. Saw it recently again and it’s a chase movie. It was awfully hard to shoot those chases with the two stars chained to each other–audiences see it today and chuckle but that wasn’t a cliche then. Sidney Poitier got most of the critical acclaim, much to Tony Curtis’s disdain, and I think Tony is right–he’s equally effective. However, both were Oscar nominated and cancelled each other out. People today aren’t interested in the theme any more. Americans think racism has been eliminated. They’re wrong.
Don’t talk to me about the TV remake–lousy! The French title was La Chaine. Great! Why didn’t I think of it. Perfect!!
JB: The cast for "On The Beach" (1961) was unusually effective.
SK: We went to Australia to make it at great expense. Then once we get there Ava Gardner tells the press she can understand why they chose this place to film a drama about the end of the world. Huge, ugly headlines. But from Ava’s perspective she was right. Because there was little night life to distract her. Had to have Greg Peck as the leader because he epitomized American values as far as I was concerned. Were we a bit too sincere as critics charged? I think there was a very real threat of a nuclear war polluting the atmosphere around that time. These days we’ve become blase about the whole question.
I cast Fred Astaire as the aging car racer and I think that worked. Tony Perkins twitched too much for my satisfaction but he brought in younger viewers. People remember the scene where the team hits San Francisco thinking they can hear Morse code being tapped out but in reality it’s the wind acting on a window shutter that is affecting the machine. And everywhere they go in Frisco there is utter loneliness. No birds chirping. And no dead bodies. That would have been too melodramatic. People had crawled away to die like rats in the basements.
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as Capt. Queeg in Kramer's 1954 film of "The Caine Mutiny." |
JB: When did you become interested in making the film version of "Judgment At Nuremberg"?
SK: When I first saw it live on (TV's) "Playhouse 90." Pretty soon after that I was working with the writer, Abby Mann, on a script that would flesh out the story and be a little less melodramatic. You could have heard a pin drop when I proposed it to the United Artists board of directors who seemed to be one in stating it simply was not box office material. So I had to stockpile as many big names as possible.
Of course Spence was immediately on board as the retired Bangor Maine judge Dan Haywood. I got a phone call from Burt Lancaster who also worked at UA and he wanted to play the German judge Ernst Janning accused of heinous crimes. It wasn’t spot on casting but Burt was the kind of box office bait I needed. Marlene Dietrich? She was chanteusing in Toronto when I made my plea on the phone and instantly said yes without ever reading a script.. Dick Widmark took a pay cut and dropped to third billing to do it. Judy Garland and Monty Clift had elongated cameos. Only Max Schell was picked up from the TV version, I had to aim for an all star power cast.
We had our problems. Burt was constantly fiddling with his German accent. Judy did her stuff all within a week. The scene when she’s in the witness box, Monty was behind me lying on the floor in the fetal position, rocking back and forth and moaning “She’s doing it all wrong.” But for his turn he kept stumbling with the dialogue, was very wooden, it was awful. Finally Spence took him to the woodshed–which was an outside trailer--and read the riot act. “Look!” Spence thundered, “You’re the best actor of your generation. You CAN do it. Look at me, speak every line to me, get that?” And Monty returned and was line perfect.
Did you know Spence had a speech of 13 minutes and we did it in one take using two cameras. It was such an emotionally unsettling speech Spence said he couldn’t do it again for different camera angles. He couldn’t be asked to sit around while the camera got reloaded and the lights adjusted. He could have turned it off and on, I told him, and the audience would never know. “But I’d know,” Tracy snapped, so it became his one take wonder.
Dietrich was a little too glamorous, I grant you that, but what could I do? She had a tiny mirror up her sleeve, would look down at it between takes to make sure everything was perfect. Dick has to verbally attack her in a restaurant as an old, regenerate Nazi. Said he just couldn’t do that but she goaded him on and kissed him when it was over. Quite a broad in my estimation.
Maybe I would make it as a miniseries these days. It ran 178 minutes and was black and white and today’s audiences wouldn’t understand it in one gulp. We thought we were making great statements but did we make a compelling picture? I had to do it. Mayor Willi Brandt loved the idea of opening a discussion among Germans. The premiere in West Berlin was something else. An elite crowd of German society sat there nervously but there was no talking, just stunned silence. At the end the audience simply left–no conversation, just utter quiet. What could they say after all?
JB: You only produced "A Child Is Waiting?" What happened?
SK: United Artists would not do it without my participation. As producer. Sure John Cassavettes had directed "Shadows" but who the hell saw it in middle America? I had lined up Ingrid Bergman and Burt Lancaster. It was a drama about autistic children before that word was ever used. We still used the “R” word. And I thought so very highly of Judy Garland in "Judgment" that I used her. In "Judgement" she’d gotten a best supporting actress nomination and been relatively quiescent. But I think Cassavettes’ directorial method spooked her. She was constantly jittery. She calmed down in scenes with Burt because she looked up to him. We shot around her as best we could. And then I had to order a recut because the director’s cut just wasn’t going to bring audiences in. And there were headlines and it turned ugly for a bit. So I went right back to directing.
JB: Your biggest all star hit was "It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" (1963) , right?
SK: Well, I’m trying to get a sequel started up that would run as a TV miniseries. This was the chase comedy of all time so I said let’s go for Cinerama. I had a wish list of comics and I personally phoned them up and all agreed and at reasonable salaries. Spence was in terrible shape so I had a stunt guy do most of the running wearing a rubber Tracy mask. If you ask me I’d say Ethel Merman is the funniest, Phil Silvers second. The theme is human greed and we’re all afflicted with that deadly sin. Tracy as the cop played the most unprincipled of them all. Did you know ZaSu Pitts came in for her bit and she died just after that–that is professionalism for you. Things got so crazy every funny person in L.A. started dropping in for a bit. My one reservation is the three hour running time. People complained their sides hurt after sitting and laughing for so long.
JB: You won the bidding war to get "Ship of Fools" (1965) to the screen?
SK: Yes. But Katherine Anne Porter also liked my films, I think that had something to do with our getting it. Did you know I first planned it as a Tracy-Hepburn film? He’d play the terminally ill doctor Schumann and Kate would be Kate Treadwell. But he was just too sick at the time, although he visited the set quite often. Kate refused to continue without him. For Mrs. Treadwell I then turned to Vivien Leigh who balked because it was going to be a great ensemble cast and she demanded first star billing. But so did Simone Signoret as the faded contessa. So I brokered this deal: Vivien would be first billed in all English speaking countries and Simone would reign supreme elsewhere!
I think I had a great cast: Jose Ferrer, Lee Marvin, Elizabeth Ashley, George Segal, Lilia Skala, and you should have seen the ship sections built on different stages.
When the two ladies got to L.A. I arranged a dinner and they nervously circled each other. Vivien detested Simone for allowing herself to get so fat. Simone detested Vivien for playing the victim. She said, “Oh, pooh. Both our husbands screwed Marilyn Monroe. What of it!” But as Vivien’s condition deteriorated on set Simone was the soul of kindness. Once I saw them sitting with their tea and Simone had gotten Vivien to laugh over something. I arranged for Viv’s companion Jack Merivale to be with her always and on days when she was unwell we’d shoot around her—we always had backup plans and finished on schedule.
JB: How did Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner start?
SK: Well, I was feeling guilty about Spence not being able to do "Ship of Fools." And great Kate kept after me about getting something for both of them to do. She said she’d look after him and he could work mornings only and it might happen. The screenplay by William Rose had possibilities but it painted the Sidney Poitier character as a saint. I figured we needed Spence’s no nonsense gruffness to sell it although Columbia came up with Cary Grant and Roz Russell and that was our B plan if Spence couldn’t work.
Predictably he failed his physical so I threw my salary into the pot as did Spence and Kate–and we had enough if something should go wrong. He was completely wonderful at 9 a.m. but by 11 he’d start to visibly wilt. Nothing in it was done that could be considered strenuous for him. There’s one scene showing him driving into an ice cream place but we used a double and he did the rest of the scene with the carhop in a studio. Kate was always fluttering around and getting us all nervous. Columbia would only allow us to have the couple–Poitier and Kate’s niece Katharine Houghton—smooching in the back seat of the taxi and we see that through the rearview mirror. I don’t even think they held hands much.
I had my fun in casting Virginia Christine as Kate’s racist art shop employee, I always liked using her. She was great in "Not As A Stranger" and in "Judgment at Nuremberg" as one of the caretakers of the home where Tracy was staying. But then she started doing those coffee commercials (She was Folgers' Mrs. Olsen) and became too well known. And I had Cecil Kellaway as the priest. Having somebody that old would detract from Spence’s infirmity, I thought.
Spence did everything on the first take and went home every day for an afternoon nap. Then one day he called Kate and me to his dressing room and said he’d figured it out that if he dropped after the next scene well that was OK because almost all the story was in the can. He actually did drop three weeks later and Kate heard him and ran but it was a heart attack and the funny thing is he’d never had heart problems. Everything else was on the blink but not his heart up to then.
We were nominated for best picture, director, actor, actress, best supporting actor and when Kate won she correctly said it was for both of them. She was in Europe by then making "The Lion In Winter." But I’ve rarely heard from her since. I think she finds it too difficult to be with his cronies and she once told me she’d never see the film.
Two points: Nobody ever answers the question in the title. Oh, it was in all right and the black maid Isabel Sanford quips “Martin Luther King Jr.”? But he was assassinated days before the movie premiere and that had to be cut out. And, yes, I did have other things planned for Katharine Houghton but she preferred to go skiing with her boyfriend.
JB: Critics then detected a falling off in your work.
SK: Well, "The Secret of Santa Vittoria" (1969) made a bundle. I had a ball but Anthony Quinn and Anna Magnani are two of the most temperamental actors around. George Cukor had already directed them in 1957’s "Wild is The Wind" and warned me beforehand, so I was well prepared and I’d just stand back as they screamed away in Italian.
But "R.P.M." (1970) was a total dud about the youth movement. Erich Segal wrote the script, so can I blame it on him? The acting was bir- brained but as director I must take full responsibility.
"Bless the Beasts and the Children" (1972) still gets fans these days but there were no stars in it and it initially bombed. I should have never taken on that fable.
And on "Oklahoma Crude" (1973) I had a fairish plot but a leading lady (Faye Dunaway) who hated her co-star (George C. Scott) and it showed in every scene they shared.
"The Domino Principle" (1977) just didn’t cut it. The stars (Candace Bergen, Gene Hackman) couldn’t carry such flimsy material.
Casting has always been everything for me but "The Runner Stumbles" (1973) needed a Pacino or a DeNiro as the anguished priest–I took a gamble on Dick Van Dyke and I lost, he was too wooden, too uptight. That was my fault, not his.
And now let’s order. Do they have Hamburger Hamlet in Canada? No? Your loss. I have bacon and eggs every day. What are you having?
©2009 by Jim Bawden. This column first posted Oct. 12, 2009.
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