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.
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