This summer, you might have already seen two very different people, chained together, forced to co-operate in order to escape their captivity. They even climbed out of a mud-pit; if you weren’t thinking about The Defiant Ones (about two chain-gang prisoners, one white and one black, in a similar mess) […]
Stanley Kramer
Inherit the Wind (1960) “something to believe in – which is not always the same as the truth” (Review)
In the mid 1950s, at the height of Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist campaign of political repression, a bold new courtroom drama opened on Broadway that allegorised a dire incident from America’s Christian fundamentalist history to excoriate the current climate of fear and repression. The play’s impact on the culture of America […]
It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963) So overambitious it’s amazing it doesn’t fall apart (Review)
Where, But In America? asked an early working title for Stanley Kramer’s extravagant Ultra Panavision progenitor of the ‘epic comedy’ genre. Scotland is the sensible answer, the planned location of a wacky race that the transatlantic writing duo of William and Tania Rose, famous for Ealing comedies such as The […]
Cinema Eclectica 85 – Time Skips and Road Trips
On this highly mobile episode we take a look at Jacques Tourneur’s “Cat People”, Paul Newman and Orson Welles in “The Long Hot Summer”, Stanley Kramer’s “The Secret of Santa Vittoria” and cult British Horror “Psychomania”. After that we hand over to our past selves for our Feature Presentation – […]
The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969) A beautifully photographed diamond in the rough (Review)
Two years after he dropped the critically lauded Sidney Poitier picture, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Stanley Kramer flew over to Italy to begin what-would-be his next big feature, an adaptation of Robert Crichton’s first novel, The Secret of Santa Vittoria. Kramer, the acclaimed director behind the courtroom drama, Judgement […]