When my late husband, Stanley Kramer, created his own independent film production company in 1947, his goal was to make some level of difference with his work in Hollywood.
The first success of that stated direction was the World War II drama “Home of the Brave” in 1949, adapted from Arthur Laurents’ play about anti-Semitism in the military. Radically, Stanley saw an opportunity with the material to shift his lens to building racial tensions in the United States, and so, in secret, he cast an African American (James Edwards) in the leading role and translated Laurents’ story about the Jewish GI experience to one about the Black GI experience. It would become the most-picketed film in history. It would also mark the start of one of our industry’s most consequential filmmaking careers.
Stanley did make a difference with his work, from stoking disarmament talks with “On the Beach” to crusading for freedom of thought with “Inherit the Wind” to tackling anti-miscegenation laws with “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” His voice was fierce and it echoed across the ages, but while it was dangerous and even life-threatening in Stanley’s day to make films of social conscience, there are times I feel it may be even more dangerous today. Filmmaking is an important tool, dare I call it an important weapon, and those who wield it fearlessly deserve encouragement and recognition. It is for that reason that, for more than 20 years, I have been honored to help amplify other fierce and independent voices with awards proudly bearing Stanley’s name.
In partnership with the African American Film Critics Association, the Karen & Stanley Kramer Social Justice Award has continued that legacy, and this year’s recipient, RaMell Ross’ transcendent “Nickel Boys” is nothing if not a reminder of the promise and the power of cinema. Ross’ film reasserts the overwhelming impact of the moving image by stretching the “rules” of visual storytelling and serving audiences an utterly unique vision. With that vision, the political becomes the personal as Ross seizes on a revolutionary way of telling the story of horror and injustice first committed to the page by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead. Both works, film and novel, expose the tragedy of the Dozier School for Boys, giving voice to the nameless murdered children whose remains, and even childhood toys, were found in unmarked graves on the property in 2016.
I’m reminded of Spencer Tracy’s soaring words from Stanley’s 1961 film “Judgement at Nuremberg.” In reading his war crimes verdict as Chief Judge Dan Heywood, he proclaimed, “Before the people of the world, let it now be noted that here, in our decision, this is what we stand for: justice, truth and the value of a single human being.”
With his bold and original approach to “Nickel Boys,” the essence of that statement is what Ross has so elegantly and persuasively conveyed. The empathy his first-person, “sentient” perspective instills as we tap into the fraught reformatory experience of two young men is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in a film before. I know Stanley would have been rocked to his core by the accomplishment.
Is the subject matter difficult? Of course it is. Surely no one reading these words is a stranger to that. “Nickel Boys” is about brutality against children. We should feel discomfited and unmoored.
But what’s so exceptional about what Ross has achieved is that he avoided the temptation to sensationalize or to be a voyeur lingering on unsettling imagery. This film does not trade in that. It’s one of the many ways it subverts expectations, in fact. Ross has said his effort was instead to replace that gaze with a work that is not looking at the Black community, but rather, looking from the Black community. It is, to say it again, revolutionary.
You may know by now the significance of one of Stanley’s own films in “Nickel Boys.” Prominently featured is the 1958 Oscar-winning drama “The Defiant Ones,” starring Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis.
It’s an extension of the film’s casual appearance in the pages of Whitehead’s novel, as Ross wanted to put Stanley’s film in conversation with his own for obvious reasons – two stories depicting characters on the run, the way race relations of the era are consolidated to cinematic relationships, etc. But he also saw something in Poitier’s deep, sonorous crooning of “Long Gone (From Bowlin’ Green)” that bookends “The Defiant Ones,” a tune born out of slavery and gospel hymns, but used as a symbol for, indeed, defiance in the movie. Along with the stirring rhetoric of Dr. Martin Luther King, Ross says he saw this classic movie moment as part of the origin story of his central character, Elwood’s, ideology and worldview.
I’m so touched by that — because with that simple conceit, Ross instantly crystallized Stanley’s belief in the galvanization of the human spirit through the magic of the movies.
For Elwood, it was one moment. For many others, I have no doubt that “Nickel Boys” will prove to be a film full of them.
Karen Sharpe Kramer is the widow of producer-director Stanley Kramer and presents the Stanley Kramer Award during the annual Producers Guild awards, as well as the the Karen & Stanley Kramer Social Justice Award at the AAFCA Awards. The 16th annual AAFCA Awards — honoring outstanding achievements in cinema with a special focus on films and performances representing the Black diaspora — will be held on Feb. 19. “Nickel Boys” filmmaker Ross will receive the Spotlight Award at the ceremony, while Brandon Wilson and Ethan Herisse will accept the Next Gen Award.
[Pictured above: Brandon Wilson and Ethan Herisse in “Nickel Boys”; and Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis in “The Defiant Ones.”]