HOW GOLDEN WAS IT?

By RICHARD CORLISS

Ah, the '50s! Sci-fi mutants, horror comic books and the birth of rock 'n' roll. But that was just kid stuff, the teen taste that eventually took over pop culture. The prevailing tone on '50s movie and TV screens was adult, earnest, upper-middlebrow. Dozens of hourlong teledramas probed modern and historical topics each week. At movie theaters people found that for every social problem, Hollywood had not a solution but a script. Are you looking for the Golden Age of Television? You'll find it in the work of Fred Coe. You want to send a movie message? Call Stanley Kramer.

Kramer is remembered as Hollywood's pre-eminent social worker. In our frivolous age his signature films about racism (The Defiant Ones), nuclear war (On the Beach), Nazism (Judgment at Nuremberg) and interracial marriage (Guess Who's Coming to Dinner) evoke a dutiful do-gooderism: school lessons, church sermons, a stern talk from Dad. In It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: A Life in Hollywood (Harcourt Brace; 251 pages; $25), Kramer, 83, gets to make a case for the defense.

He botches the job. The book, written with Thomas M. Coffey, is starchy, stentorian, too careful, like the world's longest Oscar-acceptance speech. We learn that Kramer grew up in New York City's tough Hell's Kitchen, that as a kid he belonged to an interracial gang, that after World War II he became a producer by buying the rights to two Ring Lardner stories. He writes that just before shooting began on Champion, the Lardner boxing story that would make Kirk Douglas a star, the actor got a nose job and said that in the fight scenes he couldn't get hit in the face. Kramer says he resented Harry Cohn and loved Spencer Tracy. But his telling is juiceless; there's not much life in this life.

Yet there's some life in the films, especially the early ones. They still play briskly; Home of the Brave, The Men, High Noon, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. and The Wild One all run under 90 minutes. And Kramer had a knack for finding sharp writers (Carl Foreman, John Paxton, Ted ["Dr. Seuss"] Geisel) and fresh actors; Marlon Brando (The Men) and Grace Kelly (High Noon) made their first strong movie impressions in his films.

The oeuvre also has a pleasing misanthropy. The lead character typically believes himself hated for what he is--black or paraplegic or just decent--while the background people are weak, mean souls. The townsfolk in High Noon and The Wild One have the same suspicion about the star whether he is a heroic sheriff or a cool motorcyclist. There's a bootstrap isolationism at work here: the world is out to lynch you, so you'd better make it on your own.

If Kramer's reputation is stale, Coe's is forgotten, though as producer of Philco Playhouse and later for Playhouse 90, he was the primo impresario of TV drama. Jon Krampner's engrossing The Man in the Shadows: Fred Coe and the Golden Age of Television (Rutgers University Press; 243 pages; $32.95) helps restore the stature of the Tennessean who made trouble in the studio and at home--he told his pregnant wife, "When the child is born, I want a divorce"--but was still one of TV's smartest, boldest pioneers.

Putting a show on the air in these infant years was a work of art, craft and athletic endurance. A tiny studio held three sets and three bulky cameras, whose lights pushed the thermometer up to 100 degrees; technicians could lose eight to 10 lbs. per show. The actors had to make every mark, remember every line and, between scenes, rush from one set to another without tripping over the miles of fat camera cable. Coe had to keep it all moving smoothly, cue the camera for commercials (shot live in the same studio) and, if the show ran long or short, cut or expand scenes on the spot. If a camera broke down, no problem--Coe would ad-lib a restaging of the show.

Writers, spurred by Coe, paid little attention to TV's restrictions. They'd have characters flash back from old age to youth and back again (requiring split-second makeup applications) or dream up odd location scenes. Coe's own script, This Time Next Year, called for the ghost of Ulysses S. Grant to materialize at Grant's Tomb. The actor playing Grant was to jump into an NBC limo and get uptown in time for the "remote." But there was no limo. So the actor hailed a cab and, in full Grant regalia, ordered, "Take me to Grant's Tomb!"

This was just the fieldwork. Coe also chose scripts, fought with sponsors over the hiring of blacklisted actors, scoured the theater scene for talent. He enticed stars, from Jose Ferrer (Coe put Cyrano de Bergerac on TV between its Broadway run and the Kramer film adaptation) to Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and Henry Fonda (for a Producer's Showcase staging of The Petrified Forest) to Frank Sinatra (who, in the musical version of Our Town, sang Love and Marriage). Coe's 1955 airing of the Mary Martin Peter Pan was the highest-rated show in the young medium's history.

Coe also found new stars. He gave Grace Kelly the lead in her first TV drama, two years before High Noon. When James Dean died a week before rehearsals were to begin on a version of Hemingway's The Battler, Coe had young Paul Newman step in; it was a starmaking turn.

Above all, Coe doted on writers. "He felt the writer was the center of the universe," said Horton Foote, whose The Trip to Bountiful aired on Philco before Coe produced it on Broadway. "Writers like to hear that." He encouraged writers to speak in their own voice. Paddy Chayefsky took Coe's advice and gave him Marty, starring Rod Steiger and Nancy Marchand; the next day Chayefsky heard people mimicking the play's dialogue ("What do you feel like doin' tonight?" "I don't know. What do you feel like doin' tonight?"). The film version won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1955, and Hollywood was soon combing Philco Playhouse for other scripts: The Bachelor Party, The Catered Affair, The Rainmaker and Gore Vidal's The Death of Billy the Kid (filmed as The Left-Handed Gun) and Visit to a Small Planet.

By then, live anthologies were giving way to filmed westerns. Coe worked on Playhouse 90 (his big hit: Days of Wine and Roses), but what Vidal called "a golden age for the dramatist" was over. So was Coe's influence on the televiewer's weekly diet. On Broadway he produced The Miracle Worker and All the Way Home; in the movies he directed A Thousand Clowns. But by his 50th birthday Coe had become a cultural afterthought. He died in 1979, at 54.

Today film scholars ignore Kramer's work the better to pore over Ed Wood's bizarrely inept Plan 9 from Outer Space. And TV writers, instead of challenging themselves and the medium, mostly want to rip off the latest hit. "What do you feel like rippin' off tonight?" "I don't know. What do you feel like rippin' off?"