BOOKS: HOW GOLDEN WAS IT?

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.