Background
KRAMER, Stanley was born on September 29, 1913 in New York, United States.
KRAMER, Stanley was born on September 29, 1913 in New York, United States.
He was educated at New York University, and in 1933 he joined the research department at MGM, working subsequently as an editor and casting director.
His first job as a producer was on Albert Lewin’s The Moon and Sixpence (42) and it was only in the late 1940s that he set up as an independent producer with Sam Katz, Carl Foreman, and George Glass as partners. After So This Is New York (48, Richard Fleischer), he made his name with a series of economy productions, by turns prestigious and socially realistic: Home of the Brave (49, Mark Robson); Champion (49, Robson); The Men (50, Fred Zinnemann); Cyrano de Bergerac (50, Michael Gordon); and High
Noon (52, Zinnemann). The latter was later claimed to be an allegory about McCarthyism— which is a lot of allegory. The others have all dated badly, showing up the meretricious artistic conception.
To this point, Kramer had been commercially successful: that and his liberal respectability attracted Columbia, who signed him to produce thirty films in five years, all with low budgets and high profits. It was a disastrous contract in which Kramer claimed to be hindered by the studios meanness, but still launched some unlikely ventures. There is not a good film in the lot: Death of a Salesman (51, Laslo Benedek); The Happy time (52, Fleischer); The Sniper (52, Edward Dmytryk); My Six Convicts (52, Hugo Fregonese); The Four Poster (52, Irving Reis); Eight Iron Men (52, Dmytryk); The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (52, Roy Rowland); The Wild One (53, Benedek); Member of the Wedding (53, Zinnemann); and The higgler (53, Dmytryk). The heavy losses incurred by most of these were covered by the one success, The Caine Mutiny (54. Dmytryk), but Columbia had had enough and bought up the contract.
Thus Kramer launched himself as producer/ director. Suffice it to say that Not as a Stranger is his best film, The Pride and the Passion the silliest. After that, ordeal sets in and shows no sign of fal¬tering. The greatest oddity is that his reputation has survived such critical pasting and so many box-office failures. When he died he was on the front page of the New York Times, plus a f ull page inside—more than twice the space given to Bresson.
Served to 1st lieutenant Army of the United States, World World War World War II.
In some quarters Kramer was a hero of the 1950s: an enterprising producer, cutting costs on “daring" or “topical" subjects, ultimately coming into his OWTI as a director. But the test of direction revealed all the limitations of his entrepreneurial liberalism. His own films are middlebrow and overemphatic; at worst, thev are among the most tedious and dispiriting productions the American cinema has to offer. Commercialism, of the most crass and confusing kind, has devitalized all his projects, just as his deliberate enlightenment seems to have wearied notable actors. He would answer that lie makes films for the ordinary viewer and that The Defiant Ones, Inherit the Wind, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? might be subtle moderators of prejudice. Not a jot of evidence supports that hope.
Very little encourages the thought that even vastly superior films could serv e that purpose. Kramer is a hollow, pretentious man, too dull for art, too cautious for politics. There are few films as deeply depressing as On the Beach and lodgement at Nuremberg, because their visions of apocalypse are as numbstruck as a rabbit in headlights.
Married Ann Pearce, 1950 (divorced). Children– Casey, Larry. Married Karen Sharpe, 1966.
Children: Katharine, Jennifer.