Product Description
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Award-winning producer and director Stanley Kramer was on of the
most respected filmmakers in Hollywood history. Contained within
this 6-disc collectible box set are five of his greatest
achievements: GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER, SHIP OF FOOLS, THE
MEMBER OF THE WEDDING, THE WILD ONE, and THE 5,000 FINGERS OF
DR.T. Featuring newly recorded audio commentary and new
interviews, featurettes and an exclusive, GUESS WHO'S COMING TO
DINNER bonus disc jam-packed with informative new documentaries,
rare photo galleries and more, THE STANLEY KRAMER COLLECTION is a
five-star tribute to a motion picture legend.
.com
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Stanley Kramer is not just a name in film history but a virtual
brand name for a subspecies of filmmaking. First as an
independent producer (1948-54) and then as a producer-director
(1955-79), Kramer specialized in movies with an insistent
socio-political consciousness that addressed Big
Subjects--racism, bigotry, McCarthyism, juvenile delinquency and
violence, justice, greed, historical guilt, fascism and
collaboration, The Bomb--and sought to make them the stuff of
instructive drama. Depending on one's disposition, a Stanley
Kramer picture was either powerful or preachy, courageous or
complacent, thought-provoking or manipulative, challenging or
middlebrow, hard-hitting or heavy-handed. Whatever his profile,
for the better part of two decades Kramer loomed large on the
American cinema horizon as a fighting liberal and truth-seeker.
His pictures won or were up for a lot of awards, and Kramer
himself was oft nominated for Os. In 1961 the Academy's board
of governors voted him the Irving Thalberg Award for his career
as a producer.
As an introduction, Stanley Kramer Film Collection is a bit odd.
Because Sony is the distributor, only films from the Columbia
Pictures library could be included, which means many of Kramer's
most celebrated titles weren't: e.g., The Defiant Ones, On the
Beach, and Judgment at Nuremberg, all released through United
Artists. Also, of the five pictures in the set, only two, Ship of
Fools and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, were directed by
Kramer--though the commentaries, and especially the introductions
by Karen Kramer (the producers second wife), treat him as prime
mover on all of them.
By far the most interesting item is atypical Kramer--indeed,
atypical anybody. The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953), co-written
by Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel, is a musical comedy horror
fantasia centered on a little boy at the mercy of a demonic piano
teacher. Mostly it takes the form of a nightmare: the opening
sequence looks like something from '50s sci-fi, only creepier,
while Dr. Terwilliker's labyrinthine headquarters, the principal
setting, suggests the Arabian Nights episode of the German
Expressionist classic Waxworks reconstituted in psychedelic
Technicolor. Overall, the film cely seems to have been
directed (the credited Roy Rowland goes unmentioned in the
commentaries), and some of the song sequences are a drag. But
Eugene Loring's ballet for musicians and instruments imprisoned
in Dr. T's dungeon is memorably surreal, and Hans Conried makes a
juicy Hitlerian villain. "Hitlerian" is no hyperbole: at the
climax, as hundreds of little boys are marched off buses and
stripped of their belongings before taking their places at Dr.
T's stadium-sized keyboard, there's no mistaking the death-camp
echo. Small wonder the movie spooked, rather than beguiled, the
few families who bought tickets in 1953. Reviewers didn't like
it, either. Nevertheless, it's won a cult over the years, and
today's viewers should be more receptive to its dark whimsy.
(They may even detect Dr. T in Tim Burton's Willy Wonka and
the Chocolate Factory!)
Of the other two early films, The Member of the Wedding (1952)
boasts hefty credentials--direction by Fred Zinnemann (the same
year he did High Noon for Kramer), a Carson McCullers novel and
play as source material, the original Broadway cast re-creating
their roles--but it's mostly an endurance test. Julie Harris had
triumphed on stage as Frankie, the nervy, garrulous 12-year-old
whose world in the Deep South of the 1940s has pretty much shrunk
to her family's kitchen and the companionship of wise and patient
mammy Bernice (Ethel Waters) and next-door kid John Henry
(Brandon de Wilde in his first film role). On screen, Harris's
real age (26) is distractingly apparent, and her voice, like
Frankie's aggressive neediness, can be like fingernails on the
blackboard. Although token efforts were made to "open up" the
play for cinema, the film's setting and movement remain
constrictive. Much more watchable is The Wild One (1953),
directed by Laslo Benedek and based on Frank Rooney's chilling
short story "Cyclists' Raid" about a motorcycle gang taking over
a small town. Props to Marlon Brando, by then an annual O
nominee, for agreeing to re-team with Kramer (who had produced
the actor's debut film, The Men) on what is essentially a
79-minute B movie. His reward was to become the premier icon of
1950s rebellion, pioneering the way James Dean, Elvis Presley,
and others would follow. The Wild One also introduced biker
hipster patter to movie audiences and defined biker fashion for
decades to come. So the movie is a cultural milestone--but hardly
a cinematic one: it rarely escapes feeling schematic and
overcautious in its fear of alienating the public on one hand and
glorifying violence on the other. Lee Marvin injects a welcome
of battery as the leader of a rival biker gang, and
veteran cinematographer Hal Mohr does yeoman work on dull sets.
The two specimens actually directed as well as produced by
Kramer are his final bids for O glory. Many Kramer pictures
are only a few degrees away from allegory; Ship of Fools (1965),
based on the novel by Katherine Anne Porter, sails over the brink
with its complement of variously symbolic passengers and crew on
a German vessel bound from Veracruz to Bremerhaven in the eful
year 1933. The heart of the film belongs to Simone Signoret and
Oskar Werner, O-nominated and also honored by the British
Film Academy, the Golden Globes, and (Werner only) the New York
Film Critics for their performances as two world-weary souls who
briefly console each other en route to their respective dooms.
Others in the cast include Michael Dunn (another O nominee,
as a dwarf Greek chorus), Vivien Leigh (her final performance, as
a spiritual cousin of Blanche DuBois), Lee Marvin, George Segal,
Elizabeth Ashley, Heinz Rühmann, and Jose Ferrer. Their roles are
mostly die-cut, and although the black-and-white cinematography
and art direction won Academy Awards, the film looks crude and
stilted.
The intended centerpiece of the collection is Kramer's last
critical and commercial hit, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967).
This is the one about the well-to-do, cozily liberal San
Francisco couple--Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in their
final screen pairing--suddenly confronted with the news that
their daughter (Katharine Houghton, Hepburn's niece) has fallen
in love with and intends to marry an internationally renowned
doctor who happens to be black (Sidney Poitier, America's top
box-office star that year). Kramer took an enormous risk that
Tracy, in frail , would live to finish the film; the
beloved veteran actor did, but perished days afterward, lending
the movie considerable poignancy. That undoubtedly contributed to
the film's overall kindly reception by reviewers, even as some
acknowledged its blatant contrivances. For one thing, Poitier's
character is so encyclopedically admirable that the script makes
a joke of it; and there's the totally arbitrary "necessity" of
Poitier's catching a night flight to Europe, so that the two sets
of parents have only an evening to get used to their offspring's
proposed mixed-race marriage. Given four decades of social
progress--and our generally weak sense of history these
days--21st century viewers are likely to find the film quaintly
anachronistic (and the high-school-play production values--phony
scenic backdrops and instant-sunset lighting--don't help). In
remarks recorded for the 40th-anniversary DVD, Steven Spielberg
salutes Guess Who's Coming to Dinner as "social instrument" and
"social entertainment." How instrumental it was in changing
prejudiced minds is open to question, but as entertainment the
film became identified with a moment in the history of racial
consciousness in America.
There's an extra disc devoted to Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
and Stanley Kramer's legacy, though oddly enough no running
commentary has been provided on any of the movies except The Wild
One (authoritative testimony by film historian Jeanine Basinger)
and The Member of the Wedding (meandering remarks by Carson
McCullers biographer Virginia Spencer Carr). Michael Feinstein
and others offer droll appreciations of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr.
T in peripheral featurettes. Visual quality of all the film
materials is first-rate. --Richard T. Jameson