Stanley Kramer

  • The Defiant Ones (1958)

    The Defiant Ones (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) I know, from 2020’s vantage point, that Tony Curtis has played a number of dramatic and unlikable roles in his career. But there’s a good reason why his performance as a racist criminal in The Defiant Ones is still surprising: Even today, well after the end of his career, Curtis is far better remembered as a funny romantic protagonist than anything else. His enduring renown for comedy makes his performance in The Defiant Ones still compelling: In this socially-minded Stanley Kramer film, he plays an unrepentant white racist who finds himself chained to a black man (the excellent Sidney Poitier in one of his earliest performances) while escaping a chain gang. There’s little surprise as to where the film’s overall dramatic arc is going, but some of the details along the way are interesting—the portrait of the American South, with its heavily racist atmosphere and punitive justice, is asphyxiating and almost alien. The film is at its strongest in leaning upon its literalized metaphor of two races chained together, finding a way to get past their animosity for a common goal. The stark black-and-white cinematography works in favour of the film more often than not, leaving all the space necessary for the actors to show their skills playing off each other. By contemporary standards, The Defiant Ones can feel a bit rough on messaging, but is not really any less effective for it.

  • Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)

    Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, December 2019) There is a place and a time for everything, including slow-paced dramas dealing with heady questions of shared responsibilities and war crimes. What I’m getting at is that you should give yourself plenty of time to get into Judgment at Nuremberg—at a staggering three hours and eight minutes of mostly courtroom dialogue, it’s a long sit. But you do get a lot for your time—starting with an all-star cast that starts with Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster and Marlene Dietrich, all the way to one of William Shatner’s earliest prominent roles. This film is a debate of ideas, as the American occupation struggles with the prosecution of war crimes at a time when Germany is becoming a crucial Cold War playground, and the US can be accused of having inspired some of the Nazi rhetoric. The battle between lawyers gets to some crucial issues, not the least of which is assigning blame for atrocities. Perhaps the most affecting moment of the film comes from well-known material—starkly-presented footage of concentration camps shortly after liberation, with piles of corpses and bulldozers doing mass burials out of health concerns. (Those images aside, be careful about seeing the film as fact—while it’s adapted from real-life events, nearly all the characters are deliberately fictional and condensed from the proceedings.)  Judgment at Nuremberg doesn’t pull any punches in its topic or depiction—it’s cinema as consciously codifying right and wrong, dismissing feeble objections to the contrary. Despite good-faith efforts to make the film cinematic, there is a lot here that could play as a theatrical piece, including a lengthy summation-as-judgment from Tracy that can be seen as a template for director Stanley Kramer’s climactic sequence in the later Guess Who’s Coming for Dinner. The leisurely pace, repetitive material and fixed location doesn’t work against the film as much as you’d think, though: there’s a moral argument here, and it’s not as much about finding right or wrong as it’s about how to establish right in such overwhelming fashion that there can be no lingering doubt about it. Judgment at Nuremberg does amount to an admirable piece of cinema, as compelling today as it was in 1961. But give yourself plenty of time to immerse yourself in it.

  • Inherit the Wind (1960)

    Inherit the Wind (1960)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2019) By 1960, director Stanley Kramer was hitting his prime era as a socially conscious filmmaker, tackling topics that studios were reluctant to feature. Inherit the Wind is about the Scopes Trial of 1925, in which attorney Clarence Darrow famously argued in favour of teaching evolution in schools. The text is enhanced by a subtext that mulls over McCarthyism, bringing additional interest to the result. The Hillsboro evolution trial subject matter is compelling enough, but I found myself unexpectedly captivated by the acting talent on display in the movie. The headliner is Spencer Tracy, of course, as he plays Darrow and brings his usual unassuming strength to the role. There’s also one great late-career role for Fredric March as the prosecuting lawyer. But my happy surprise was to see Gene Kelly playing a cynical newspaper reporter, very far from his musical roles but compelling from beginning to end thanks to some incredible dialogue. (A quote for the ages: “I do hateful things for which people love me, and I do loveable things for which they hate me. I’m admired for my detestability. (…) I may be rancid butter, but I’m on your side of the bread.”) The humour is quite biting. It helps that the script takes the time to lay the groundwork in describing life in a small town (“Old Time Religion” is used as a musical leitmotif), right before the media circus begins. Inherit the Wind remains of topical relevance today: on the basic issue of evolution in school, it often looks as if some areas of the United States have barely advanced in a century, and the everlasting debate between free-thinking and authoritarian rule remains at the root of quite a few political issues even right now. Inherit the Wind’s technical quality translates into something still immediately accessible. It’s sobering to think that the exact same film would be just as controversial today—I can already imagine a dozen disingenuous columns arguing that movies like this one are why the red states keep voting against their own self-interest.

  • Ship of Fools (1965)

    Ship of Fools (1965)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2019) There are many ways in which Ship of Fools reminded me of Grand Hotel—its 1930s setting, its ensemble cast with overlapping subplots, its black-and-white cinematography and its mixture of American and German characters. However, the comparisons only go so far and the crucial difference between the two movies is not that one is in a building and the other on an ocean liner, but that one was made in 1932 and the other one after World War II. As a result, expect a lot more Nazis in Ship of Fools than Grand Hotel, and the portentous veil that this distance casts over the entire film. As the film begins assembling its large cast of characters, it quickly becomes apparent that this isn’t just about people travelling from North America to Europe on a steam ship, but a message movie about the rise of fascism in Europe. (Contemporary viewers would have known that from seeing that it’s directed by Stanley Kramer, a renowned social issues filmmaker.) The foreboding feeling is accentuated by the characters opposing their views on the world, and the film sides squarely with the marginalized over more conventional heroes. (In addition to characters with terminal illnesses or mental conditions, there are Jewish characters, obviously, and the film’s most likable character, its narrator, is played by 3′10″ Michael Dunn in an Oscar-nominated performance.) The ensemble cast is impressive, what with Lee Marvin, Vivien Leigh (in her last film), José Ferrer and a terrific Simone Signoret. Ship of Fools is certainly preachy, but there’s a powerful sense of impending doom as the characters get closer to their German port of arrival. The last few moments are particularly hard-hitting, as the narrator delivers a bitterly ironic envoi.

  • It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963)

    It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, January 2019) The 1960s were a strange time for movies, with studios chasing epic films in a decades-long fight to convince TV viewers to make the trip to theatres. It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World is special in that it (along with The Great Race) was a rare attempt to make an epic comedy rather than rely on oh-so-very-serious biblical or historical source material. The result is, indeed a spectacle: As a few strangers hear a dying thief give them the location of a hidden treasure, the rest of the film is a madcap, multi-character chase through the southwestern United States in an attempt to get to the treasure before everyone else. The ensemble cast is a collection of early 1960s comedy stars, even though most of them are now unfamiliar to contemporary audiences. Still, what has not gone out of style is the succession of action set-pieces, impressive stunt work, breakneck editing and far-fetched comic situations in which the characters find themselves. Where else can you witness a plane flying (for real!) through a billboard; a man destroying a service station; or characters stuck on an out-of-control fireman ladder? It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World is admittedly very long—at nearly three hours (with half an hour cut from the first showings!), it would be a test of anyone’s patience, except that the laughs and the fast pacing do keep things hopping quickly: director Stanley Kramer may not have the deftest touch with comedy and specifically verbal comedy, but the result speaks for itself. While the film is easy to like, there are a few things that hold it back from unconditional love—namely, that the point of the film is a greedy chase, and so nearly every character (even the one played by the normally likable Spencer Tracy) eventually succumbs to pure old-fashioned backstabbing greed. The ending does the most of what it can with the cards it’s given, but there’s still an absence of a pure happy ending for anyone that stings a bit. Still, It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World is a classic for a reason, and its sheer lengths and density of comic set-pieces make it a decent prospect for a rewatch.

  • Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)

    Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2018) It’s not a failure if some social-issue films don’t work as well now than at the time of their release—sometimes, the world moves in the direction advocated, and as a result the film looks as if it’s been outpaced by the future. So it is that the central conceit of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (a white girl bringing back a black fiancé home for her parents’ approval) doesn’t quite have the same charge fifty years later. And that’s quite all right. This being said, let’s not take this for a condemnation of the work from director Stanley Kramer, or by Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier, and Katharine Hepburn. After all, the film finished shooting six months before Loving v. Virginia actually legalized interracial marriages across the United States. But it does feel a bit stuffy, all the way to a conclusion that boils down to an intensely paternalistic “Father has thought about it and will let you crazy kids do whatever you want” conclusion. It’s not quite fair to dismiss the film in such a way (and indeed, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’s ending gets far more potent once you read about how Spencer Tracy died two weeks after shooting his final scene and final film with long-time co-star Katharine Hepburn) but it is definitely a reflection of its time, and time has moved on.

    (Second Viewing, On Cable TV, October 2018) As I suspected, revisiting Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner after watching a handful of Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn movies has significantly improved my opinion of the film. This was a partial re-watch, focusing on the scenes featuring Tracy and Hepburn, and it affirms that Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is a terrific victory lap for Tracy, whose kindly-father persona here acts as a capstone to a career that saw numerous pairings with Hepburn at various moments in their careers. It’s easy to imagine a shared backstory for their characters that includes bits and pieces of Woman of the Year or Adam’s Rib, and that’s when context can become crucial in seeing what the fuss is about a particular movie. If you de-emphasize the racial message and focus on the Hepburn/Spencer couple, this film becomes a satisfying epilogue to a shared on-screen career, well worth watching if you’re familiar with the rest of the Hepburn/Tracy filmography.