Word: kramer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Perhaps the reason Kramer was eating up the questioners' semi-condescending 'artistic appreciation' was its novelty. For years, Kramer was Hollywood's only liberal "socially-conscious" producer-director (with the occasional exception of New York outsiders like Kazan). He stayed in Hollywood for studio money and soundstages, and his films were among the few made there that dealt, on a large scale, with important contemporary subject matter: racial strife, American "success", the misfit problems of war veterans and motorcycle gangs. To make them, Kramer had to fight--and then compromise. He hoped to film the T.V. play, Judgment at Nuremberg...
...Kramer's formulae worked out pretty well throughout the 50's and 60's, both financially and critically. Taking a subject like nuclear warfare, he'd film it in a tendentious style, cohering to simplistic argument (e.g., the scale of nuclear warfare is a bad thing) and conventional Hollywood form ("human interest", sex and jokes). He walked off with plaudits from the press, and a fistful of Oscars. But few of the films he's directed himself stand up as more than the worst kind of "message movie...
...Kramer's latest effort says nothing much about everything. Elements of youthful alienation, masculine role-playing, western violence, and the sterility of bourgeois life, are all either sketched in, or driven home with a sledgehammer. Bless the Beasts and Children is so lacking in intellect, or psychological veracity, that its heavy allegory of six middle-class youngsters who try to save 70 buffalo from an annual sport-slaughter becomes, in effect, only a shaggy-bull story. Columbia execs must be worried: the film has, in general, been drubbed, and they've given it a big Boston build-up. They...
...Kramer tried to please the people in that Brandeis office. Perhaps he was just thinking ahead to the two other engagments he had to speak at that night; perhaps he recognized the sycophants sucking up to him between the Johnny Walker and the club sandwiches as just another business duty. For all his anti-Establishment fighting, Kramer admits to being part of the vested interests. He's brought in his films underschedule, underbudget, and the statements they convey are so vague anyhow, that you wonder why they were ever "controversial...
...first inclination in such gatherings is to learn whatever possible, and run; to write Kramer and the "conference" off with a zero. But Kramer has had such a great influence on mass audiences in his heyday, and his films for so long epitomized Hollywood's "serous" award-winners, that it seemed a cop-out to let him off the hook, to go back to Cambrige and spout some brief sobering statements about old-time-movie decrepitude. I engaged Mr. Kramer myself, and asked him whether his films had political intentions, and whether he conceived his films in political terms...