On Feb. 7, the 50th anniversary Blu-ray edition of Stanley Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner will be released. Sony sent me an advance copy.
It's very nice, in 1080p High Definition glory with a 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio, if those things matter to you. (It looks and sounds good.) There's a commemorative photo book with an essay by Gil Robertson. The only niggling point is that all the special features on the film are the same ones that were on the 40th anniversary DVD, but if you haven't seen them, they're new to you.
It's an important film, one that I've occasionally shown to classes and lectured on. Today it feels a little paternalistic and didactic, but I can remember that it had a real effect on people in the late '60s. It seems strange that Sidney Poitier's groundbreaking role was ignored by Oscar voters in 1967, but it was nominated for 10 Oscars. It won two -- Katharine Hepburn took home the Best Actress statue and William Rose won for Best Screenplay.
Even if you've never seen the movie you probably know that it's about a young white woman (Katharine Houghton, Hepburn's real-life niece) bringing her (brilliant, handsome) black doctor fiance (Poitier) home to meet her upper-class liberal parents. Complicating the situation, the daughter has invited her fiance's parents (Roy E. Glenn and Beah Richards) to join them for dinner to "meet the in-laws." The film is mainly a talky drawing room comedy, spiced up by Cecil Kellaway as a charming priest and Isabel Sanford as the obligatory pragmatic and feisty black maid who doesn't approve of the relationship.
While I retain fondness for the film, part of that is no doubt due to my fondness for Kramer, who died in 2001. I credit him with providing one of the moments where I began to see how things fit together -- when the little marks on the page begin to coalesce into words, when the tumblers click and suddenly quadratic equations make sense. It happened a few minutes into Kramer's 1961 film Judgment at Nuremberg, when Maximilian Schell left off the German and began speaking English.
"Oh, so that is how the problem is handled," I remember thinking; "somebody thought of that."
This was years before I had any conception of any director, of any controlling intelligence behind the movies. I thought movies just happened, or that they were a collaboration between actors and camera operators. Judgment at Nuremberg gave me my first inkling of the Oz behind the curtain.
For this reason it is possible I overvalue Kramer and Judgment at Nuremberg. He was never among the first rank of Hollywood directors; he never developed a particular Krameresque aesthetic. Even his best films don't impress the way minor Hitchcock or John Ford projects impress. He had no distinctive cinematic style, and casual moviegoers can be forgiven for not knowing who he was.
He had a square mainstream career, working within the Hollywood system rather than against it. He was probably more businessman than artist, but as a director he had a string of issue-oriented hits beginning with The Defiant Ones in 1958. He was nominated for an Oscar for best director for Judgment at Nuremberg, and if he had done nothing else he should be remembered as the uncredited producer of High Noon.
Kramer was, for the record, a journeyman director -- a hack, some would say -- who also produced a good many films, most of which reflected a classic liberal belief in the ability of a powerful medium to bring about social change. He meant to entertain first, but he also wanted to raise our consciousness and improve our world.
He seemed to harbor twin impulses -- to entertain and to educate -- which he indulged to varying degrees in all the films he directed. His star-studded 1963 extravaganza It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, was viewed as a fiasco at the time, and seems wildly self-indulgent today, but over the years it has developed a cult following and a lot of revised four-star ratings.
While some of his movies, like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, feel naive and even a little embarrassing today, his best films were crowd pleasers and statements of belief.
As a director, Kramer made films about race, anti-Semitism (Ship of Fools), the Scopes monkey trial (Inherit the Wind) and even an early '70s ecology film (Bless the Beasts and Children).
Judgment at Nuremberg was probably his best, one of the best courtroom dramas ever made. It presents several thorny jurisprudential issues -- the problem of ex post facto law as well as jurisdictional and selective prosecution questions -- in a way that neither condescends to nor mystifies the moviegoer who happens to be innocent of the law. It features a half-dozen great performances: Schell won an Oscar for Best Actor, while Spencer Tracy was nominated for the same award. Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Judy Garland, Richard Widmark and Werner Klemperer (who'd later portray Col. Klink on TV's Hogan's Heroes ) were also excellent. And there's even a relatively restrained performance from a very young William Shatner.
Kramer was as close as Hollywood came to a popular social conscience in the 1950s -- while director Fred Zinnemann is rightfully given the bulk of the credit for High Noon, in retrospect Kramer's involvement in the 1952 Western, which can be read as an allegory about McCarthyism, is interesting. While the symbolism of The Defiant Ones is almost unbearably heavy-handed, Kramer produced Mark Robson's superior Home of the Brave, a character-driven war movie that tells the story of a black soldier sent on patrol with an all-white squad.
Kramer might not have been a great director, but he aspired to use movies to do more than enrich himself. He was a believer in the power of film to change the world, and he spent his life making conventional but heartfelt movies that endeavored to do just that.
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MovieStyle on 02/03/2017