And in case you youngsters out there are wondering, Stanley Kramer (1913 - 2001) was, of course, the producer/director (and yes -- auteur, I think) behind such films as High Noon, The Defiant Ones, Judgement at Nuremberg, and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. He was a pretty big deal in his day, but his reputation has taken a precipitous dive over the years and I'm sure you older folks out there know the conventional rap on the guy's work -- he's a stodgy, uncinematic middlebrow peddling the tritest kind of liberal pieties. Or as David Thomson, who's a Brit but nonetheless one of the best critics currently working, put it: "Commercialism, of the most crass and confusing kind, has devitalised all [of] his projects".

There's more than a grain of truth in all that, and I've probably said stuff about Kramer along those lines myself, but I think two things need to be added, just for the record. For one, at least some of the anti-Kramer raps came (and still come) from 60s auteurists who were using him as a convenient cudgel to beat traditional Hollywood over the head with while promoting their own fave European art house directors, some of whose work IMHO hasn't aged so well. Of course, that's a longer argument for another column.

For another, there's at least one Kramer film that I think requires absolutely no apology, one that remains as moving and startling and poetic as the day it was first released. I'm referring, of course, to the 1960 end of the world saga On the Beach.

If you've never seen it, it's a product of the Cold War at its coldest. Based on a novel by Nevil Shute, the film (set contemporarily) takes place in the aftermath of a nuclear war that's wiped out everybody on Earth except for the folks in Australia. Down Under, life is going on on more or less normally, which is to say fairly stiff upper lip, but eventually we realize that the survivors are actually awaiting the inevitable arrival of the radioactive cloud that will finish them as well, said survivors including an American submarine commander played by Gregory Peck.

Here's the concluding ten minutes, featuring Fred Astaire's remarkable suicide scene and the heartwrenching farewells between Peck, whose ship is heading back to the States so the crew can die at home, and Ava Gardner, a troubled but appealingly vulnerable woman with whom he's had a brief and intense love affair that's the very definition of doomed romanticism. To this day, I can't watch Gardner watching the sub sail away without sobbing uncontrollably.

As you can see from the above, there are least three sequences in the film that are as gorgeous as any in screen history, and inconvenient as it may be, Stanley Kramer has his name on all of them.

The first: the sunlit farewell clinch between the tragic lovers...

The second: the travelling shot that pulls back through the window of Gardner's sports car as she watches the submarine pull out of the harbor...

...and finally, the wordless closeup of the play of emotions on Gardner's face as she faces the abyss with more courage than she or the audience believed her capable of.

Any one of those would, or should, be enough to secure Kramer's reputation, I think.

And if that be middlebrow, than so be it.

In any case, you can -- and very definitely should, I think -- order On the Beach here.