Pictures at a Revolution (17 page)

The party broke up into smaller groups that straggled away at dawn, with the younger guests who had stayed on as long as there was fun to be had now asleep, stretched out on mattresses in the house or on the veranda as the tents came down. The older guests had retreated earlier, back to their homes in Beverly Hills and Brentwood, perhaps amused and perhaps alarmed at their first extended glimpse of the inheritors of their kingdom. Vadim and Fonda, in each other's arms, looked out at the ocean and back at the revelry's debris. Vadim thought it looked like a movie. But not a Hollywood film. More like something by Fellini or Antonioni,
³⁶
unresolved and inchoate, that would leave everyone walking out of the theater talking and wondering what would happen next.

E
very time he made a movie that fell short of his hopes, Stanley Kramer felt “a kind of pain that starts somewhere near the groin and goes up to the chest, as though you're having a heart attack in your stomach.”
¹
Lately, he was feeling it again. His latest film, an all-star adaptation of Katherine Anne Porter's novel
Ship of Fools
, was due to open on July 29, and Kramer could already recognize the onset of the sickening deflation of his own expectations. How could it have been otherwise when, by his own admission, he “had dreamed it would be a great accomplishment, a definitive motion picture showing what the medium can be” and not merely “a good piece of work that didn't quite fulfill our aspirations”?
²

In 1965, Stanley Kramer was, at fifty-one, as enshrined a member of the Hollywood establishment as anyone in the movie business, and there was probably not an active producer or director who would have hated that description more. Kramer had been making movies since the late 1940s. He had started as a producer, overseeing Mark Robson's
Home of the Brave
, an adaptation of an Arthur Laurents play that dealt with racism in the American military. Kramer went on to produce
The Men
(Marlon Brando's movie debut),
High Noon, Death of a Salesman, The Member of the Wedding
, and
The Caine Mutiny
in the space of a few years. His movies were emblematic Hollywood prestige projects, and he made sure his name and reputation were so firmly associated with them that by the mid-1950s, moviegoers already knew what a Stanley Kramer movie was—something serious and charged and significant and edifying, if not necessarily innovative or aesthetically unsettling. In the 1955 movie-biz melodrama
The Big Knife
, Jack Palance, playing a down-on-his-luck movie star, barks at his wife (Ida Lupino), “You know that this industry is capable of turning out good pictures—pictures with guts and meaning!” “Sure, sure,” she replies, “and we know some of the men who do it! Stevens, Mankiewicz, Kazan, Huston, Wyler, Wilder…Stanley Kramer!”

In the mid-1950s, Kramer decided to step behind the camera himself and start directing. “Stanley's drive has always been to be the boss, the man who wants it done his way,” his longtime associate George Glass later said. “The time came in the industry when directors took greater control over picture making than ever before. So Stanley, in my opinion, decided if that was where the action was, that was where he'd be, by God.”
³
He loved tackling topics that would make news—racism in
The Defiant Ones
, the threat of nuclear annihilation in
On the Beach
, the Holocaust in
Judgment at Nuremberg
—but, as many of his own friends and colleagues, including Norman Jewison, put it, “Stanley was a better producer than he was a director,”
⁴
and once he was in the director's chair, he continued to think like a producer, concentrating on the overall package rather than the shaping of individual scenes, performances, and moments. “Guts and meaning” was a label he would have loved, although he sometimes undercut himself by being too willing to trumpet the presence of both qualities in his films. Kramer wanted credit for the politics and moral rectitude that he believed gave his pictures weight and significance, but while he understood that great movies had to be more than the sum of their issues, he didn't always know how to get them there. He didn't possess what came naturally to many of the directors he admired—an unforced sense of pacing or camera placement or a particularly visual imagination—and the screenplays for his films (which he did not write) often omitted nuance, surprise, and specificity in favor of a stentorian sense of the wrongness of things that all right-thinking people already agreed were wrong: racism, the threat of nuclear annihilation, the Holocaust.

Kramer was respected within the world of old Hollywood as a reliable filmmaker and a staunch civil libertarian. In 1960, he had defied a demand from the American Legion that producers not hire “Soviet-indoctrinated” writers, calling the organization's stance “reprehensible,”
⁵
a position that was not without some risk in a business still very much in the chokehold of McCarthyism. The movies he made were manna for the Academy—his producing career had brought him four Best Picture nominations by the time he won the Academy's 1962 Irving Thalberg Award, essentially a lifetime achievement honor for a producer—and they were revered by middlebrow reviewers. When
Judgment at Nuremberg
opened in 1961,
The New York Times
' Bosley Crowther pronounced it “persuasive” and said “it manages to say so much that still needs to be said.”
⁶

But Crowther, typically, never managed to explain what exactly he had needed to be persuaded about, and Kramer's appetite for matter over art made him into something of a whipping boy for the critical intelligentsia. In 1965, Pauline Kael, who had not yet been hired by
The New Yorker
but was building a reputation as a pugnacious contrarian as eager to pick fights with her rivals as she was to tear down the movies they supported, launched a blistering attack on Kramer, using the arrival of
Ship of Fools
as her pretext. She mocked him, not entirely unjustly, for his tendency to sound self-important and chest-thumping in interviews. His reputation, she said, was “based largely on a series of errors.” She twitted him for mistaking storytelling that “represents a blow for or against something” for “art.” She took apart his films one by one, calling them “irritatingly self-righteous,” “messianic,” and “feeble intellectually”; she belittled the “original sin meets Mr. Fixit” style of his plots. “Kramer asks for congratulations on the size and importance of his unrealized aspirations,” she concluded. “In politics a candidate may hope to be judged on what he intends to do, but in art we judge what is done. Stanley Kramer runs for office in the arts.”
⁷

If François Truffaut exemplified, as Robert Benton and David Newman had written in
Esquire
, “Style over Content,” Kramer and his films epitomized Content over Style—the “Old Sentimentality” of the Eisenhower era. The label was particularly painful for a director who, unlike many in his generation, was an open-minded advocate of the new directions world cinema was taking in the 1960s and an avid fan of Fellini, Kurosawa, and Antonioni.
⁸
Kramer had a hard time understanding how critics like Kael could give him so little credit for ambition, especially since his films were sometimes more controversial than those who belittled him acknowledged. His adaptation of
Inherit the Wind
had been picketed at many theaters; some southern movie-house chains wouldn't play
The Defiant Ones
, in which escaped prisoners Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier were shackled together as an ironclad symbol of interracial brotherhood. And the critics who charged that Kramer's movies pandered to what they considered to be a good-liberal consensus ignored the reality that most of the films he directed were financial failures. “All the people who say ‘Messages are for Western Union' really don't mean it,” he said. “They mean, ‘Messages that don't make money are for Western Union.'”
⁹
While
The Defiant Ones
, thanks to its very low budget, squeezed out a small profit,
Inherit the Wind
lost almost 90 percent of the $2 million that it cost,
On the Beach
ended up in the red, and despite its Best Picture Oscar,
Judgment at Nuremberg
lost money as well.
¹⁰
How, wondered Kramer, could Kael believe that he was viewed as “some sort of savior”
¹¹
when he wasn't even filling up the pews? And how could other critics fail to see Kramer the way he saw himself, as a lifelong outsider, an independent producer who “took on the establishment
within
the Hollywood firmament”?
¹²

Kramer wasn't humble, and he knew his weakness for grandiosity in print made him an easy target. In an interview on the set of
Inherit the Wind
, he proclaimed, “In
The Defiant Ones
we dealt with the problem of race.
On the Beach…
concerns the big question, the Bomb. And now I'm dealing with what I consider the third major problem today, freedom of speech and, more important, freedom of thought.”
¹³
But in person, people found Kramer disarming; they were often surprised to discover that the slender man behind the big talk was soft-spoken, witty, and self-aware. And his fiercest detractors might have been surprised, or at least amused, to hear the director's own assessment of his work and his motives. Kramer once told an audience that he chose to direct “because I'm arrogant and I have an ego and I enjoy it.”
¹⁴
But he almost always ended up disappointed in himself and his movies, particularly those he made in the 1960s. After
Judgment at Nuremberg
, he produced 1962's
Pressure Point
, a drama about a black psychiatrist (Poitier) treating a white racist (Bobby Darin). “It isn't an even match,” he admitted. “You know from the start that Poitier must win…you can blame me for undertaking the project before [thinking] it through completely.” In 1963, he produced
A Child Is Waiting
, with Judy Garland as a teacher caring for an autistic boy. “When you attempt a subject [that] difficult and delicate…you had better be sure that what you're making will be just about the best picture of the year. This one wasn't,” he wrote. When Kramer, in a change of pace, directed 1963's
It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World
, he intended, quite sincerely, to make the funniest comedy in the history of motion pictures, and decades later, he still expressed disappointment that his “silly dream” yielded a film that “just had too much of everything.”
¹⁵

Kramer thought
Ship of Fools
, a portent-filled
Grand Hotel
about the various travelers on a ship bound for Germany in 1933, offered all the ingredients for a prestige blockbuster. Instead, its reception was fairly typical: respectful but not ecstatic reviews, eventual Oscar nominations, and only middling box office. In 1962, when Kramer had started working on
Ship of Fools
, his decision to make the film at Columbia instead of United Artists, which had been his base of operations for several years, made headlines.
¹⁶
Three years later, his cold streak at the box office was so protracted—even
It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World
, which audiences loved, was so costly that it wouldn't make much of a profit—that his switch in studios no longer seemed to mean much.

When
Ship of Fools
opened, Kramer was feeling particularly heavyhearted; he knew the film might have represented his last chance to work with Spencer Tracy. Tracy was sixty-five and had been in poor health for years; after the deaths of Clark Gable and Gary Cooper within months of each other in 1960 and 1961, he was seen by many as one of the last links to the first generation of sound-era male movie stars. In the past several years, Tracy had acted infrequently, and almost exclusively for Kramer, who had directed him in
Inherit the Wind, Judgment at Nuremberg
, and in a tiny role in
It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.
When Kramer first read Abby Mann's script for
Ship of Fools
, he knew he wanted Katharine Hepburn to play the role of an angry, neurotic alcoholic—a showpiece character turn that captured Hepburn's interest immediately. But Hepburn would do the film only if Kramer agreed to give Tracy what amounted to the male romantic lead, the role of the ship's doctor. Kramer resisted; Tracy was far too old to play the part and too frail as well. When Hepburn realized that Kramer wouldn't cast Tracy, she decided not to make the film;
¹⁷
her part went to Vivien Leigh, and Tracy's went to Oskar Werner, who was more than twenty years his junior.

Ship of Fools
did provide Kramer with one happy memory; on the set, he met Karen Sharpe, the woman who would become his third wife and who, by the time the film opened, was already his biggest cheerleader. “I used to get angry with him because he'd say, ‘It's not as good as I dreamed it.' It's
never
as good as you dreamed it, I'd tell him. You have to make compromises—the sun doesn't go down at the right time, so you lose that shot you envisioned. Or the actor that you hired because you loved him suddenly says he can't say your favorite line in the movie. You have to make compromises when you're working with people. And I don't think Stanley was completely happy with anything he ever made.”
¹⁸

Kramer shook off his disappointment and went back to work. He had long wanted to make a movie about war—perhaps even
the
movie about war—and he started looking for a book about Vietnam to adapt. With the exception of George Englund's prescient Marlon Brando drama
The Ugly American
in 1963, Hollywood movies had barely touched on the war in Southeast Asia. But in 1965, as President Johnson increased the number of American soldiers in South Vietnam from 23,000 to 184,000 and a national antiwar movement began to gain traction, Kramer wanted to mark the subject as his territory. He acquired the rights to a novel called
Seek Out and Destroy
and made a public announcement that he was planning a major take on the Vietnam War, but he felt there was no need to rush.
¹⁹
His next movie was to be an adaptation of MacKinlay Kantor's 1955 Civil War novel,
Andersonville
, a script he had already spent three years developing. He would have time for Vietnam later.