For a moment, Kramer dropped his guard ("baring" himself, as he put it), and told the audience about his projected film on Lt. Calley. Kramer has the rights to John Sack's book, and spent five weeks at the courtmartial getting seventy hours of tape. "You've got to recognize that he's a human being. Certainly, he's uneducated and inarticulate. But he's a human being, and the prosecution was trying to make him out as some kind of animal...Before you understand My Lai 4, you've got to understand My Lai 1 and My Lai 2. This man leveled a village before he was even fired on. But so had every captain in the Army".
At one point, a crowd bustled out of a rehearsal hall. "Can't be our overflow," muttered Kramer. In his final summation, he repeated his "changing one mind" and "heady wine" statement, and shot a glance at the critics' corner.
Thus went Stanley Kramer. That night, he represented not only the ludicrous aspects of Hollywood deep-think, but the frame of mind needed to outjob mainstream Hollywood product. All his films have the built-in sentimentality evidenced by his one-man, one-"feeling" statements, and this negates any biting commentary he ever wishes to make. Most men are basically good, says Kramer's films; their political and social ills are shallow compared to the potential of their 'untapped depths of human understanding'; if you get a Negro and a cracker on the same side of a chase, they'll learn to respect each other. Think of Pauline Kael on Ship of Fools: "Original Sin Meets Mr. Fixit." As for recalcitrant Nazis or racists: Kramer only suggests slaughter.
Kramer's is the easiest kind of statement to make superficially and still score emotional points. Audiences have always been gulled by it, even 'sophisticated' ones, so Kramer's influence must not be simply scoffed at. In fact, the only alternatives offered to it by the few American films dealing with contemporary social ills have been 16mm Newsreel formlessness, the terrorism of ex-Weatherman Robert Kramer's Ice, the varying documentary techniques of Wiseman, De Antonio et al. None are really interested in getting at the conceptual root of an issue, and then advocating viable morality or actions. None really operate to aim at the heart of the film audience.
The only film industry which seems to have overcome its skittishness over politics is the Italian. Bellochio, Petri, Pontecorvo, Bertolucci have all made films which transform tough social criticism, by passion and human perception, into art. Even Italian hacks, like Montaldo of Sacco and Vanzetti fame, are hacks on a higher plane. If American film is to mature, its maturity will come from those able to confront Kramer's value system and erase its sigma from socially-conscious flimmaking. As Robert Steel said (in New American Review No. 4):
...any work of art that manages to capture a sense of the immediate and face it with an intellectual conception of general import requires artistic skill, discipline and sensibility of the highest order. This doesn't happen often, but when it does we are reminded of what Hollywood seems never to have learned: that politics is not a stranger to art, but at the very center of man's struggle with himself and his society.
A friend of mine was filming the Kramer proceedings for one of his Brandeis film courses. At times, he'd lower the sound equipment he was holding to fill in details (with snickering nonchalance), of Kramer's own productions. I urged Pete to sink his film in a time capsule, so that future generations will know that once there were filmmakers who didn't know much about film, weren't interested in taking stands on social issues, but felt very committed to people. If, that is, those generations--after years of Kramer-like brainpickling--will be able to tell the difference between authority and self-justification.