There’s a poignancy in turning back the clock to the Fifties and early-Sixties. Everyone remembers Marilyn Monroe singing ‘Happy Birthday, Mr President’ in honour of Jack Kennedy, so soon to be slain. How many people remember her making The Prince and the Showgirl, from a Rattigan script, and co-starring with Olivier? Well, some people do if they’ve seen My Week with Marilyn with Michelle Williams and Ken Branagh. Or that Dame Sybil Thorndike said, ‘The only person who knows how to act in front of a camera is that little girl over there.’ Marilyn had wonderful comic timing, as Germaine Greer pointed out, and films such as Some Like it Hot will live forever.

They made The Prince and the Showgirl into a musical, The Girl Who Came to Supper, with José Ferrer as the Prince. The Puerto Rican actor won an Oscar for Cyrano de Bergerac and was Paul Robeson’s Iago. Robert Hughes describes the ‘lugubriously feigned’ sexual intensity with which Ferrer, as Toulouse-Lautrec, gazes at Zsa Zsa Gabor’s ‘boiler-plated buttocks’ in Moulin Rouge. He plays the defence attorney (to Humphrey Bogart’s Captain Quig) in The Caine Mutiny, and he’s the creepy Turkish officer who beats Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. He comes to mind now because he plays a Nazi traveller in Stanley Kramer’s Ship of Fools, one of his stately black-and-white epics, full of Kramer’s sense of lament for the horrors of the world in the 1930s.

We think of Stanley Kramer at the moment because of Nuremberg with Russell Crowe’s charm and ghastliness as Goering, which reminds us of the spaciousness and depth of the courtroom drama Judgment at Nuremberg in which Spencer Tracey is the homespun American judge who presides over sessions that include Maximillian Schell as the defence counsel, in unsubtitled German, Marlene Dietrich as an aristocrat, and Burt Lancaster as a German judge.

Ship of Fools, Kramer’s rendition of a world about to be desecrated and desolated, has Vivien Leigh in her last screen role, fighting off a confused and aroused Lee Marvin. It has Ferrer insisting on a particular bunk in the cabin he shares with an easygoing Jewish chap. It has ‘a little person’ (Michael Dunn) with an indefatigable sense of the folly of these travellers heading for what might be foregone conclusions. There are scenes of extraordinary grace and sorrow in the depiction of a German doctor (Oskar Werner) with a weak heart and Simone Signoret as a French woman who has trouble sleeping. He gives her a drug and then lulls her to sleep with what might be the most narcotic lullaby in the world. The whole romance is presented with an engulfing sense of sadness and is breathtaking.

Anyone who’s ever wondered why Sidney Lumet could cast Signoret, with her French accent, as Arkadina in his film of Chekhov’s The Seagull, with Vanessa Redgrave as Nina and James Mason as Trigorin, need wonder no more. Signoret is the prostitute in Max Ophüls’ masterpiece La Ronde. Werner is Jacques in Truffaut’s Jules et Jim and is one of the very greatest of all twentieth-century actors.

The sweeping, masterful sense of impending fatality in Ship of Fools is an index of the way the hazardous realities of the Cold War carried Stanley Kramer’s mind back to a Western civilisation that knew not what it did. Australia took in over 170,000 refugees in the late-1930s, but most countries did not.

Ava Gardner, making On the Beach for Kramer with Gregory Peck, did not really say Melbourne was the perfect place to make a film about the end of the world, but Kramer was certainly preoccupied with the world’s coming to an end.

High Society is about the continuities. It’s an MGM musical with songs by Cole Porter – made in 1956, a couple of decades after Anything Goes. It’s an adaptation of The Philadelphia Story, which George Cukor made under the wing of Joe Mankiewicz with Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart. High Society is, in its way, just as starry with Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra (as well as Celeste Holm who was still acting on the Broadway stage in the early-1990s although she had created the role of Ado Annie in Oklahoma! in 1943 and was therefore the first person in the world to sing ‘I’m just a girl who can’t say no!’). In High Society, she sings one of the two greatest duets in the history of the musical theatre, ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’ – in this case with Sinatra.

The other one is for Crosby and Sinatra: ‘Well, Did You Evah!’ Crosby remarked of Sinatra, ‘Frank is a singer who comes along once in a lifetime. Why did it have to be my lifetime?’ It’s a matchless performance full of supreme ease. Some people will say they prefer Debbie Harry and Iggy Pop, but Crosby and Sinatra are perfectly balanced, flawlessly distinguished. The lines have bits of 1950s double entendre (‘She got pinched in the Ass-tor bar’), but it’s all good clean fun and has a bottomless sophistication.

The future Princess Grace is breathtaking in her beauty and she has a pure succulent irrepressible charm as she makes a zigzagging beeline back to the man she has divorced. She’s a born star – and it’s good to be reminded of her dazzling virtuoso quality in comedy – and there’s even a very modern line on no consent when the girl is tanked up. It’s a beautiful film and it’s not hard to see how Australians like Simon Phillips the director and that versatile leading man Simon Burke have wanted to have a crack at it.

You might find you can live without Louis Armstrong and his band, but they add a different kind of noise amid all the drawling, drooling upper-class American flirting and foolery.

It’s instructive to see just how grand and mournful Stanley Kramer’s Ship of Fools is and how much it captures without exaggerating the sorrow and the pity of the collective catastrophe it gives such space to. Memory is inclined to imagine this is too grand in its sweeping sorrow but revisiting it suggests what we have lost in forgetting Kramer’s ambition to encompass a world. High Society is a world away in its facetiousness and sophistication but it has a tremendous energy and a sensuously rampant zest for life that is an open invitation to take another look at yesterday’s America with its powerful belief in human decency.