Everything from the dolly shots to the camera zooms to the long takes of speeches. It's a testament to the director where a three hour film whose majority takes place in one room, keeps you invested the entire time.
shareKramer also directed Inherit The Wind, another great court room drama.
shareI always thought Kramer's abilities as a director were too often unjustly dismissed or denigrated. Like any director he had his flaws but his direction was fluid, he handled his actors extremely well and his films never lagged in their pace. Steven Spielberg, for one, thinks he was one of the best filmmakers ever.
He did receive three Oscar nominations for Best Director: for The Defiant Ones (1958), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), and six of the films he produced were nominated for Best Picture (these three plus High Noon, The Caine Mutiny and Ship of Fools). I never understood why his reputation was always suspect in some people's eyes. By any rational standards he was a very good director.