Entertaining Audiences While Making Them Care

Hollywood is full of perils for the filmmaker. Not the least of those perils is being ahead of the wave because when the wave breaks it is too easy for the world to forget that you got there first.

Stanley Kramer, who died Monday morning at 87, had lived on into an age of film in which battles he won to have his say seem all but meaningless to young filmmakers who can say and do almost anything. The revolutionary change in the rating system, along with more sophisticated audiences who grew up watching more candid and explicit fare, have created an atmosphere much different than in Kramer’s early days.

Kramer, a strikingly handsome, sturdy man of out-sized courage, took a fierce pride in his work, yet it was balanced by a paradoxically self-deprecating strain in him that seemed to deny the mantle of “Hollywood’s conscience” that had been draped around him. He did not see himself as a preacher, but in the most memorable and enduring of his 35 films he was an advocate for the civic and private virtues of reason, tolerance, integrity and steadfastness against trouble of any kind.

He did not invent social realism as the stuff of movies. D.W. Griffith in “Intolerance,” King Vidor in “The Crowd,” John Ford in “The Grapes of Wrath” and even the exploitative Warner Bros. gangster films of the ‘30s had walked that ground. But Kramer had begun his career at a time in the ‘40s when Hollywood was already changing and on the verge of more drastic changes as television began making inroads on the moviegoing audience.

“Sheer entertainment” was and is the norm for movies; all that has really changed is that the definition of what entertains grows broader and broader--witness “Chocolat” and “Traffic” vying for Oscar honors this year. But Kramer’s operative philosophy, in the majority of his films, was that audiences could be made to care even as they were being entertained.

To this end, Kramer believed in great casts and great performances and a general absence of gray. Characters were as rotten as the Kirk Douglas boxer in “Champion” or as noble as the Sidney Poitier physician in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” But Kramer’s theme in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” was not moral complexity but the possibility of racial intermarriage in a period in American history in which men, women and children were still dying in the cause of civil rights.

The presence of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, as well as Poitier and Hepburn’s niece, Katharine Houghton, made anything but a happy ending unthinkable. The film was made more than three decades ago, and it seems to be part of an amazingly different time.

I am thrust back to a stifling June morning in 1966 when, at Hepburn’s invitation, I went to the Columbia studios on Gower Street to watch the morning’s work on the film. Hepburn’s secretary met me as I arrived and said Kramer had revised the shooting schedule and that Tracy would be doing the long monologue at the end of the film. Tracy’s health was precarious. In a lovely gesture, Kramer and Hepburn had both pledged their salaries as insurance in case Spence, as Hepburn always called him, was unable to finish the film. I wanted to leave but Hepburn wanted me to watch, hidden in the wings, unbeknown to Tracy.

The speech, as Tracy addresses Poitier and his parents, Hepburn and Houghton is movingly eloquent in any context, but as Tracy tells Poitier, “If you love our daughter as I have loved her mother, you two will be fine.” If ever dialogue had a subtext for the actors themselves, that was it and after Kramer quietly said, “Cut,” there was a pause, and then applause. Tracy put his arm around Kramer and said, “OK, Stanley; you’ve got it.”

As it happened, Tracy finished his work but died only a few days later. When he died, I wrote that I hoped the film would be a fitting legacy to the most dignified association Hollywood had ever known. It has been, and, although there were half a dozen films to come, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” is also a fitting capstone to Stanley Kramer’s own career. It reflects his craftsmanship as a director, because he was a model of the filmmaker who believed in the well-made movie. The film embodies as well his passionate belief that the role of motion pictures in society must be positive yet reflect the negative forces that must be opposed.

Kramer’s hallmark is visible on his films from the beginning to the end, on those that worked and on those that did not reach his aspirations for them. For his intentions and in fact for his disappointments as well as his triumphs he has left a filmography that is proud, distinctive and a vivid chapter in the life of the movies.