Stanley Kramer Film Collection (Guess Who's Coming to Dinner / Ship of Fools / The Member of the Wedding / The Wild One / The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T)

Product Description Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner (1967) When Joey Drayton (Katharine Houghton) brings her fiancé, Dr. John Prentice (Sidney Poitier), home to San Francisco her meet her affluent parents, played by the incomparable Spencer Tracey and Katherine Hepburn, their liberal sensibilities are challenged because he is a black man. Prentice is perfect in almost every way - accomplished doctor, well-mannered, well-dressed and handsome - but it is his skin color that unnerves them. Radical in its time, Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner was an examination of race and class issues projected through a comedic lens. These issues were dealt with on multiple fronts, from internalized racism (the black housekeeper) to unexpected tolerance (the family priest), and as well as held a mirror up to white liberalism showing that it was not always what it professed to be. Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner celebrates the 40th Anniversary of its theatrical release. Ship of Fools (1965) Adapted from the novel of the same name, this film is a series of overlapping stories about several passengers on a ship making a trans-Atlantic voyage to 1930s pre-Hitler Germany. Aboard this ocean liner are wealthy Jewish men, bitter lovers, sleazy dancers, Nazi supporters and sugar field workers returning to Spain after a season in Cuba. Lumped together they create a hot bed of disillusionment, prejudice and delusions of grandeur. The Member of the Wedding (1952) Based on the 1946 novel by Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding is the story of Frankie Addams (Julie Harris, East of Eden), an awkward adolescent tomboy. Rejected by the other girls in her peer group, her only friends are the family cook and her seven-year-old cousin. Her loneliness transports her to a make-believe world where she accompanies her brother and his new bride on their honeymoon. The film offers an insightful look into loneliness, adolescence and the trials and tribulations of growing up. The Wild One (1953) In one of his most famous roles, Marlon Brando stars in this outlaw biker film as gang leader Johnny Strabler. This film is inspired by an incident that happened on the Fourth of July 1946, when a group of 4,000 motorcyclists invaded the quiet California community of Hollister. The bikers were more rebel rousers than actual threats, but things slowly unraveled between the gang and the townspeople. Predating Rebel Without a Cause by two years, The Wild One is one of the first films to deal with the generation gap, a theme echoed in numerous teen movies of the ‘50s. The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953) Written by the beloved Dr. Seuss, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T is a musical fantasy that delves into the mind of Bart Collins (Tommy Rettig, Lassie) a young boy who hates playing the piano. One night his nightmare takes him to a surreal land run by a maniacal piano teacher. This tyrant owns a gigantic piano which he forces Bart and 499 other boys to play (with their 5,000 fingers). However, not all hope is lost; with the aid of a plumber named August Zabladowski (Peter Lind Hayes, The Peter Lind Hayes Show) the boy creates a noise-sucking machine that destroys the mega-piano and sets the boys free. In the tradition of Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of OZ, this film illuminates a bizarre world where reality and fantasy intersect. Amazon.com Stanley Kramer is not just a name in film history but a virtual brand name for a subspecies of filmmaking. First as an independent producer (1948-54) and then as a producer-director (1955-79), Kramer specialized in movies with an insistent socio-political consciousness that addressed Big Subjects--racism, bigotry, McCarthyism, juvenile delinquency and violence, military justice, greed, historical guilt, fascism and collaboration, The Bomb--and sought to make them the stuff of instructive drama. Depending on one's disposition, a Stanley Kramer picture was either powerful or preachy, courageous or complacent, thought-provoking or manipulative, challenging or middlebrow, hard-hitting or heavy-handed. Whatever his profile, for the better part of two decades Kramer loomed large on the American cinema horizon as a fighting liberal and truth-seeker. His pictures won or were up for a lot of awards, and Kramer himself was oft nominated for Oscars. In 1961 the Academy's board of governors voted him the Irving Thalberg Award for his career as a producer. As an introduction, Stanley Kramer Film Collection is a bit odd. Because Sony is the distributor, only films from the Columbia Pictures library could be included, which means many of Kramer's most celebrated titles weren't: e.g., The Defiant Ones, On the Beach, and Judgment at Nuremberg, all released through United Artists. Also, of the five pictures in the set, only two, Ship of Fools and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, were directed by Kramer--though the commentaries, and especially the introductions by Karen Kramer (the producer’s second wife), treat him as prime mover on all of them. B