The veteran American filmmaker, Stanley Kramer, has died in Los Angeles at the age of 87. Mr Kramer, whose films included High Noon and Judgment at Nuremberg, was a rare voice of political dissent in the post-McCarthyite Hollywood of the 1950s, tackling issues such as racism, creationism and nuclear proliferation.
In later years his "message movies" were often criticised as simplistic, but others disagreed. "Stanley Kramer is one of our great film-makers, not just for the art and passion he put on screen, but for the impact he has made on the conscience of the world," director Steven Spielberg once said.
Born in New York in 1913, Stanley Earl Kramer grew up in the city's Hell's Kitchen area and worked as a film researcher and editor before military service in 1942.
He was one of the first independent producers to make a mark in post-war Hollywood, and it was that freedom from studio interference which allowed him to produce such films as Champion (1949), which explored racism in the US military, and Marlon Brando's first film, The Men (1950), along with an adaptation of Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman (1951), and the anti-McCarthy western, High Noon (1952).
He then signed a deal with Columbia Pictures, which he described in his autobiography as "one of the most dangerous and foolhardy moves of my entire career". With Columbia he produced the first "biker" film, The Wild One, and the military drama, The Caine Mutiny (both 1954).
Kramer began directing with Not as a Stranger (1955) and the overblown epic, The Pride and the Passion (1957), before returning to social commentary, attacking racism in The Defiant Ones (1958), nuclear proliferation in On the Beach (1959), creationism in Inherit the Wind (1960), and Nazi war criminals in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961).
To prove that he could direct comedy, he made the all-star blockbuster It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in 1963. It was his most commercially successful film.
After an adaptation of Ship of Fools (1965), Kramer made Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?(1967), which dealt head-on with interracial marriage and starred one of his favourite actors, Spencer Tracy, who appeared in three other Kramer films.
Stanley Kramer made several more films during the 1970s, but none was well received. His last film as a director was the unconvincing thriller, The Runner Stumbles.
In 1980 he retired and moved to Seattle with his second wife and two daughters, where he taught and wrote a newspaper column. "I've enjoyed a good career in the movie industry, yet not as good as my ambitions had led me to hope," he wrote in his autobiography. "My pictures were never, ever good enough to approach the dream."
