A guest who just won’t go away

It was not a label he embraced, but somewhere along the line Stanley Kramer became known as a maker of message movies. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, as a producer and director, Kramer (who died in 2001, at age 87) tackled such issues as racial prejudice, fascism, juvenile delinquency and the threat of nuclear annihilation.

The Producers Guild of America hands out the Stanley Kramer Award annually for a film that addresses important social issues (this year it went to “The Great Debaters”). Kramer has justly been celebrated for daring to foreground difficult, seldom-discussed topics during the complacent climate of Eisenhower America. But his films also ended up proving that good intentions go only so far. He was never the most exciting or expressive of filmmakers. Many of his movies suffered from a stiffness and simple-mindedness that was antithetical to convincing drama.

It could even be argued that Kramer’s bluntly formulaic brand of liberalism made the social-justice film unfashionable for years to come. He seemed even more outmoded in comparison with the American New Wave that galvanized Hollywood in the ‘70s, and after a series of commercial and critical failures, he retired in 1980.

Sony’s new Stanley Kramer Film Collection -- containing five films that he produced, two of which he also directed -- will not do much for his reputation, though to be fair, it also doesn’t adequately convey the scope and topical ambition of his early career. The set contains two Kramer-directed films, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (1967) and “Ship of Fools” (1965), and three that he produced: Fred Zinnemann’s “The Member of the Wedding” (1952), Laszlo Benedek’s “The Wild One” (1953) and Roy Rowland’s “The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T” (1953).

Kramer has better or more interesting films to his name -- the all-star comic epic “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World” (1963) or the chain-gang drama “The Defiant Ones” (1958), to name a couple -- but “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” is the movie that has, to a disproportionate degree, shaped his legacy. (It has also just been issued in a 40th anniversary edition.)

This self-important drawing-room comedy, in which a young white woman brings home Sidney Poitier to her chagrined liberal parents, has its adherents, but it seems more quaint and condescending with each passing year. (An ailing Spencer Tracy, in his last role, and Katharine Hepburn, who won an Oscar, cut through the hokum more effectively than their younger counterparts.) Kramer has said that the saintliness of Poitier’s character -- a noble, well-off, multiply credentialed doctor -- was an attempt to undermine existing stereotypes. But he inadvertently created a new one: the model assimilationist hero, the non-threatening black character who set the benchmark for on-screen minorities for decades.

Poitier’s character is less a human being than a catalog of positive traits, and the film’s genteel San Francisco setting, not to mention the terms of its to-marry-or-not discussions, are remarkably untouched by the fury and urgency of the period’s civil rights struggle. In that light, the problem with Kramer’s films wasn’t that they constantly referred to social issues -- it’s that they all too often retreated from the messier realities of those issues.

As for the other films, “Ship of Fools” is a leaden chronicle of a ‘30s ocean cruise bound for Hitler’s Germany, with a cross-section of types (artists, aristocrats, gypsies, Jews, Nazis) on board. “The Member of the Wedding,” a plodding coming-of-age drama, is notable mainly for the then 26-year-old Julie Harris’ Oscar-nominated stunt performance as a preteen tomboy.

“The Wild One,” generally considered the first biker movie, has an insolent energy in spots and a widely mimicked and parodied Marlon Brando performance (“What are you rebelling against?” the dewy love interest wonders. “Whaddaya got?” he famously responds with a shrug).

The film in the set that has best withstood the passage of time is also the one that barely takes place in the real world: the Dr. Seuss-scripted hallucination “5,000 Fingers.” But this small gem of Oedipal horror is also an unmistakable anti-authoritarian allegory, and in its way, one of Kramer’s more successful political films.