Stanley Kramer- favorites, least favorites

Liked a lot
Ship of Fools 1965
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World 1963
Bless the Beasts & Children 1971
On the Beach 1959

Liked
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner 1967
The Defiant Ones 1958
Judgment at Nuremberg 1961
Inherit the Wind 1960
The Domino Principle 1977

So So
Not as a Stranger 1955
Oklahoma Crude 1973
R.P.M. 1970


Didn't Like
The Secret of Santa Vittoria 1969
The Pride and the Passion 1957
The Runner Stumbles 1979

best - Judgment At Nuremberg, The Defiant Ones, Ship Of Fools, It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.

worst - Oklahoma Crude, The Runner Stumbles, The Pride & The Passion

good, so i'm not the only one who disliked them, especially The Pride & The Passion

Good
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World 1963
On the Beach 1959

OK
The Defiant Ones 1958
Inherit the Wind 1960

Meh and not seen
The Runner Stumbles 1979
The Domino Principle 1977
Oklahoma Crude 1973
Bless the Beasts & Children 1971
R.P.M. 1970
The Secret of Santa Vittoria 1969
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner 1967
Ship of Fools 1965
Judgment at Nuremberg 1961
The Pride and the Passion 1957
Not as a Stranger 1955

My opinions:

Best:
Judgment at Nuremberg
Inherit the Wind
On the Beach
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
Ship of Fools

Good:
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
The Defiant Ones

Indifferent to bad:
Not as a Stranger
The Secret of Santa Vittoria
Oklahoma Crude
The Domino Principle
R.P.M.
The Pride and the Passion
Bless the Beasts and Children
The Runner Stumbles

Of course, these are the films Kramer directed as well as produced. Prior to 1955 he produced, but didn't direct, a large number of generally very good films, including The Caine Mutiny, High Noon, Champion, Home of the Brave, The Wild One, The Sniper, The Men, The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, Cyrano de Bergerac and several others. He also produced, but didn't direct, Pressure Point in 1962. They're as much a part of his legacy as his directorial efforts. After 1967 his career went downhill fast, mainly because he chose poor subjects and didn't do them well. But before that, either as producer or director, he had a generally solid filmography (with a few exceptions such as the dreadful The Pride and the Passion).

Oleg;you are one of the few people who liked "Bless the Beasts and Children" a film most consider to be Kramer at his pretentious,preachy, worst.
I liked Pride and Passion more then "Beasts and Children" at least Passion has great battle scenes and nice Spanish scenary to compensate for that all 3 leads fall very flat.

Thanks hobnob53
Our lists are similar except I didnt't think The Domino Principle was ok, and Bless the Beasts and Children was excellent. In fact I was surprised how good it was.

>>But before that (1967), either as producer or director, he had a generally solid filmography (with a few exceptions such as the dreadful The Pride and the Passion).

Somehow Sophia Loren happened to be nadir for most directors be it Carol Reed (The Key), Michael Curtiz (Breat of Scandal), Henry Hathaway (Legend of the Lost), George Cukor (Heller in Pink Tights). I would assume Charlie Chaplin didn't notice it and cast her in A Countess from Hong Kong. But surely by the time of Man of La Mancha to Pret-a-Porter (Robert Altman) it was clear

I don't know much about how much he was involved in producing, but I would assume Zinnemann, Dmytryk, etc had their own input ?

It also interesting to note that he had huge array of stars he worked with in his first dozen years as director - Spenser Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant, Robert Mitchum, Katharine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Vivien Leigh, Olivia de Havilland, Simone Signoret, Sophia Loren, Ava Gardner, Judy Garland, Gregory Peck, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Fredric March, Richard Widmark, Tony Curtis, Montgomery Clift, Sidney Poitier, Maximillian Schell, Gloria Grahame + the casr of Its a Mad Mad World.
After that stars list became much less impressive

Hi Oleg,

Actually, I didn't think The Domino Principle was okay. I didn't like it at all, the one time (long ago) I saw it. Basically that last list can really all be put down to films of his I disliked to varying degrees.

Good observation about Sophia. It's long been observed that Hollywood never knew what to do with her, trying to make her natural earthiness artificial. She came out fair in her first American film, Boy on a Dolphin, with Alan Ladd and Clifton Webb (directed by Jean Negulesco) and was pretty good opposite Cary Grant in Houseboat. But overall her English-language films were a very mixed lot. (She also did well in her extended cameo in her husband's Carlo Ponti's 1965 war epic Operation Crossbow, directed by Michael Anderson.)

Kramer did work with great casts. Have you noticed how his affinity for MGM's musicals led him to cast the studio's three biggest musical stars in three successive of his films? Fred Astaire (On the Beach), Gene Kelly (Inherit the Wind), Judy Garland (Judgment at Nuremberg).

The directors Kramer hired for his earliest films I'm sure had input into their casting and perhaps some of the crew but remember it's the producer who really is in charge of a movie from start to finish (at least this was the case, back when). The auteur theory has obscured this, and the erosion of the position of producer with the profusion of dozens of hangers-on and money-men now labeled as an endless array of "producers" in movies and TV shows has also undermined the critical importance of the producer in shaping a movie. It's the producer who sets the stage and hires the people. This is best done in cooperation with his director and some others and I believe Kramer did allow his directors much leeway in such matters, as well as in shaping the film. But he still deserves a large amount of the credit for making it all happen in the first place...as well as for hiring the people who brought the film about.

Though it must be said that, to his eternal discredit, Kramer behaved in a craven and cowardly manner by trying to have screenwriter Carl Foreman's name cut from the credits for High Noon after Foreman was blacklisted. Kramer furiously distanced himself from Foreman -- who had written four of his films -- and cut him off completely, while even the conservative Gary Cooper remained friendly and sympathetic to him. In 1952 Foreman relocated to England where he became a highly successful writer-producer until his return to America in 1975, but he never forgave Kramer his abandonment and efforts to discredit him. In the 60s when Foreman was in Hollywood on business he ran into Kramer in an elevator at Columbia and Kramer wouldn't even acknowledge him, looking away and staring at the floor until they got off, at which point Kramer hurried quickly away.