GUESS WHO’S SUBJECT OF A FILM SERIES

On Friday, the County Museum of Art begins a major retrospective of the films of Stanley Kramer, leading off--entirely appropriately, it seems to me--with his “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” from 1967.

It is, I would think, his biggest success, having grossed more than $85 million on a cost of only $3.5 million. It is one of the six Kramer films to have been nominated for best picture (along with “High Noon,” “The Caine Mutiny,” “The Defiant Ones,” “Judgment at Nuremberg” and “Ship of Fools”). In all, his 35 films as a producer, of which he also directed 15, have had 85 Academy Award nominations and 15 Oscars.

“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” itself had 10 nominations, including one for Spencer Tracy posthumously, with Oscars for Katharine Hepburn and screenwriter William Rose.

It was also what could be called the prototypal Kramer film: a well-made story, at least slightly larger than life, enacted by stars as luminous as any in the Hollywood skies, and all designed to carry a humanist message of tolerance and understanding toward a situation of controversial social change, in this case the love between Sidney Poitier as a young doctor and Katharine Houghton as the daughter of Hepburn and Tracy, liberals forced to confront their principles.

For all his honors from his peers, and for all his reputation as one Hollywood producer who, working within the dream factory, consistently tried to bespeak the liberal conscience, Kramer has probably absorbed more critical arrows than any American film maker of his stature.

He has been dismissed as simplistic and melodramatic, a man hitting his issues too squarely, however urgent the issues were. The complaints weren’t always ill-founded, although his principal detractors, in his early days particularly, tended to be Eastern critics unwilling to acknowledge the severe difficulties of getting any kind of meaningful picture out of an industry neurotically anxious to displease no one.

(Dwight Macdonald, taking a last shot, said he was abandoning film criticism because he’d been unable to persuade Kramer to stop making movies.)

Yet even seen out of the context of their times, films like “Champion,” “Home of the Brave,” “The Men,” “High Noon,” “The Wild One,” “The Caine Mutiny,” “The Defiant Ones,” “On the Beach,” “Inherit the Wind” and “Judgment at Nuremberg” stand as achievements that set standards by which later films can still be measured for their aspirations, or their timidity.

(As a sardonic and slam-bang essay on greed, Kramer’s “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” has its own cult status as a showcase for a half-century’s worth of great comedians, Keaton to Jonathan Winters.)

Kramer came back to Hollywood earlier this week in preparation for the retrospective, and he’ll be on hand to meet the audience opening night. He moved to Seattle in 1978 with his wife, Karen, and their two young daughters--always more a loner than a joiner in Hollywood, he’d wanted to distance himself from a community with which he felt ever less rapport.

In what is, obliquely, his most autobiographical film, “RPM” (1970), Kramer made Anthony Quinn a college president, an old, proud liberal who finds himself not liberal enough for his angry students (the revolutions per minute were on the campuses). Quinn as a rejected liberal seemed unmistakably an alter ego for Kramer. The film was not successful, critically or commercially, but it will stand as a document of its times, and as a piece of the Kramer portrait.

“I keep wanting to write a book,” Kramer said over lunch, “about all the confrontations I’ve had over the years--like the Navy telling me I couldn’t do ‘Caine Mutiny’ because there’d never been a mutiny in the Navy, and never an officer like Queeg. Then I kept meeting Navy officers who said, boy, had they ever served under Queeg. The Navy finally cooperated on the film, but only on the promise that I wouldn’t say they’d cooperated in the credits.

“I’ve got folders of stuff. The trouble is that you get to Chapter 20, and what about Chapter 20? That’s where you get to say, ‘Therefore, this is what I believe. . . , ‘ and I’m less sure than I was what I believe.

“I remember Robert Hutchins saying that the key to education is learning to ask questions; the thing is, there aren’t too damned many answers around.”

Kramer made one film in Seattle, “The Runner Stumbles” in 1978, with Dick Van Dyke as a priest, already thrust into a kind of small-town limbo by his bishop, who falls in love. It was topical and earnest but unsuccessful, a play that did not find independent life as a movie.

Since then, Kramer has been doing a weekly local television show, movie-themed; writing a general-interest weekly column for the Seattle Times, teaching at Bellevue Community College and lecturing widely (“I’m never sure why,” Kramer says. “If a guy’s got a dream about doing a movie, he’s going to do it his way. But maybe you can tell him something about technique”).

It seems clear that at 71, he is restless. He has three film projects in preparation, one of which he’s been in town to talk about--a remake of the Ronald Colman vehicle “A Double Life,” this time starring a black actor (Colman portrayed an actor playing Othello in the film).

He talks about leaving Seattle, possibly even going bi-coastal, New York and the California desert, the better to follow his children’s fortunes. One daughter is an actress-singer who hopes to go to Juilliard, another is an equestrienne. Two children from an earlier marriage live here; a son teaches at UCLA, a daughter works in television.

Chapter 20 notwithstanding, I hope Kramer will get to work on that book, collecting his memories of figures as disparate as Vivien Leigh (“Ship of Fools”) and Lt. William L. Calley Jr., on whom he did a television drama.

When he was announced for “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” Spencer Tracy said: “Everybody tells me how good I am, but only Stanley gives me work.” Tracy in fact did four films with Kramer, starting with “Inherit the Wind,” and Kramer’s never forgotten the first day of shooting. “Spence as Darrow was interviewing the jury. He mumbled his speech and the sound man came over and said he hadn’t been able to record it. I told Spence that, and asked him to do it again. Oh, did he tell me off.

” ’ Mister Kramer,’ he said, ‘it has taken me 40 years to learn how to read a line that way. If you want to recruit some kid from UCLA to say it your way, you go right ahead.’

“This, in front of the cast and crew. You wanted to die, you know? But he was putting me on. Then he grinned and did it, and let me off the hook, not only then but ever after.

“In ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,’ his health was terrible. He hadn’t been drinking for five years, couldn’t drink, but the damage was done; his insides were all messed up. A week before we were going to start, we discovered he was uninsurable and Columbia, which was scared to death of the picture anyway, was going to drop it. But Kate and I put up our salaries and we went ahead.

“On the morning after we shot the big speech at the end, when he says to Poitier, ‘If you love our daughter the way I’ve loved her mother, you’ll be all right,’ we had only three days left to shoot. Spence put his arm around me and said, ‘Stanley, even if I die on the way home this afternoon, you’ve got the picture. You don’t really need me for those last three days.’ He died--what--two or three weeks later, no more.

“He never saw the film. But what a curtain speech, and what a fitting climax to that magnificent career.” Indeed a man could, I think, put up with a few arrows for the satisfaction of having given Spencer Tracy that last, memorable outing.