Judgment at Nuremberg
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Movie Reviews of Judgment at Nuremberg
Movie Review: "There Are Devils Among Us."
Summary: 5 Stars
JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG is a splendid fictionalization of the "Justices' Trial" held at Nuremberg after World War II. While much less well-known than the initial War Crimes Trial of 1945-46 which sentenced Hermann Goering and other leading Nazis, the actual "Justices' Trial" was unique in that it put sixteen leading German jurists on trial for participating in the Nazi legal system.
Spencer Tracy plays a rural American Federal District Court judge who is selected to preside over the trial of four defendants accused of sentencing prisoners to torture and death for such 'crimes' as mental incompetency, anti-Nazi statements, and race defilement (i.e., having personal relationships with "Untermenschen" such as Jews and Gypsies). Tracy is bewildered as he struggles to understand how the Germans, an obviously cultured and gregarious people, could fall into the destructive death grip of National Socialism. His final conclusions are shattering and should resonate in the inner core of any viewer.
While in Nuremberg, Tracy strikes up a relationship with the aristocratic widow of a German military officer executed for butchering American soldiers at Malmedy (played by Marlene Dietrich) who expresses nothing but disdain for Hitler, and yet fails to grasp the enormity of the vast societal crime committed during the war years.
Played out against the background of the rapidly spreading Cold War, the later Nuremberg Trials were seen by most as unnecessary excesses; the need to enlist the Germans as allies (in 1948) threatens to derail the legal process as American officers begin to unconsciously parrot the pragmatic language of wartime Germans who "went along" with Nazism in a spirit of expediency.
Richard Widmark plays the American prosecutor who unrepentingly dedicates himself to exacting punishment for Nazi crimes against humanity. Among his evidence are documentary films of the concentration camps. JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG marked the first time these horrifying images were used in a mass-media entertainment production.
Maximilian Schell plays the young, earnest defense counsel whose dedication to Germany virtually forces him into the Nazi mold. Schell, a newcomer at the time, won an Academy Award for his intense and frightening performance. His cross-examination of Frau Wallner (Judy Garland), a witness once accused of kissing a Jewish male friend, is a study in controlled hatred, and one of the finest character portrayals ever committed to film.
Schell's moral descent is punctuated by his demand to know why only Germany is on trial when the Russians, British, the Americans, and even the Vatican turned a blind eye to the obvious degeneracy of Hitler who made no secret of his intentions. Schell's closing argument is impassioned, rational, and terrifying in its implications.
As Schell descends into a relativistic darkness, the preeminent German jurist, Defendant Ernst Janning, (played by Burt Lancaster) struggles with his inner demons and begins to rise from the abyss, gaining a modicum of moral respite as he forcibly rebukes Schell, changes his plea to "Guilty," and testifies as to the soul-destructive nature of "a passing phase which became a way of life." Lancaster's Janning is truly tragic, more so because he so clearly understands that "he made his life excrement when he walked with [the Nazis]."
Ultimately, Janning is faced with his own irredeemable failings. Yet, Janning (and the others) are not demons in human form, they are just men, men who chose the easier path. Just as any other human beings, the Nuremberg defendants were presented with the choice between morality and amorality. That they chose amorally is not an inherent defect of the Germans as a people; but it is a defect of the people of World War II Germany, and potentially of any people. The message of JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG is that every person must make the same choices with the same results, and with the same consequences.
No actors today could carry such roles. The performers in JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG literally swallow the scenery, and the intensity of the story has rarely been matched, even by SCHINDLER'S LIST, the only war-era film worthy of comparison.
The DVD transfer is excellent, though the DVD lacks very much in the way of special features. A particular oversight is the absence of any kind of real documentary on the actual Nuremberg Trials, something which would seem to be almost mandatory.
JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG is a film which must be seen. It is a catalogue of the worst of human failings and an indictment of blind jingoism. It is also a paean to the value of every single human life.
Movie Review: Essential Courtroom Drama Questions the Accountability of WWII War Crimes Via a Powerful Cast
Summary: 5 Stars
Screenwriter Abby Mann and actor Richard Widmark died within a day of each other just this past week, which makes a revisit with this eminently powerful 1961 courtroom drama all the more appropriate. At an epic-length 186 minutes, the movie is a fictionalized account of one of the many trials held after WWII before the U.S. Nuremberg Military Tribunal, this one the 1948 trial of four Nazi judges who used their power to enable the Third Reich to conduct experiments upon Jewish prisoners, and had accountability for murder, brutalities, torture, and other atrocities directed toward the Jews. Directed by Stanley Kramer (The Defiant Ones, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner), the king of socially conscious cinema in the late fifties and sixties, the film digs deeply into the ethics of assigning war crimes responsibility to individuals.
The heavyweight cast is the primary draw here. With his quiet authority, Spencer Tracy plays Chief Judge Dan Haywood who has the unenviable task of presiding over the tribunal. For the prosecution is attorney Col. Tad Lawson, who shows actual footage from the devastating remains of the German concentration camps when they were liberated. Widmark plays Lawson with equal parts grit and petulance. Defense attorney Hans Rolfe is portrayed by a young Maximilian Schell in a volcanic performance as his character raises valid questions on the degree of the defendants' accountability. As the trial moves along, two key episodes dominate the proceedings with two icons playing near-cameo roles. A fidgety Montgomery Clift plays a mentally unstable victim of Nazi sterility measures, and a downcast Judy Garland is an Aryan hausfrau accused of having sexual relations with a Jew, a crime punishable by death for the Jew guilty of "racial pollution". Kramer draws out brilliant turns on the stand by both actors.
Burt Lancaster plays Ernst Janning, the only one among the four defendants who shows a trace of a conscience given his aristocratic background and known early resistance to the Third Reich. Even with aging make-up, the strapping actor appears physically wrong for the mostly passive role, but he manages to deliver his final testimony with knowing conviction. One of the other judges is a surprisingly vituperative Werner Klemperer memorable later as the befuddled Col. Klink on TV's Hogan's Heroes, and also in the supporting cast is a young William Shatner, well before Star Trek, as Haywood's aide. The legendary Marlene Dietrich plays a somewhat ancillary role as German widow Frau Bertholt, whose husband was put to death by Haywood for war crimes. In their key scene together, she and Tracy provide the film's most humane moments amid the unrelenting tension of the trial.
Mann's script is superbly drawn out even if Kramer's ponderous direction can get a bit sluggish at times. The extras on the 2004 DVD are most worthwhile. First up is a twenty-minute conversation between Mann and Schell ("In Conversation with Abby Mann and Maximilian Schell"), where they talk extensively about not only the film but also the earlier "Playhouse 90" TV version and the 2001 Broadway production (in which Schell played Janning). There are two other shorts - a six-minute dissection of the script by Mann ("The Value of a Single Human Being") and a 14-minute featurette about Kramer consisting primarily of interviews with his widow Karen ("A Tribute to Stanley Kramer"). There is also a photo gallery and the original theatrical trailer. I wish the DVD included the original TV version, but this is a superb telling of a most devastating episode in the recent history of mankind.
Movie Review: Spencer Tracy - Here Comes the Judge!
Summary: 5 Stars
Judge Dan is a country judge from the state of Maine who feels he was flown in because they could not find anyone else for the tribunal. The big tribunals were complete with the major Nazi war criminals sentenced or committing suicide. Time for the little guys, which the movie states the American people are not that into these events.
Spencer Tracy makes a solid performance as the lead tribunal judge at the Nuremberg trials. A young William Shatner in one of his first appearances as a Captain acts as his aide - a minor role. Tracy's character does not just look at the books and the records, but goes out to the Germany of the people.
We see the Germans as Dan sees them: singing in the beer hall, going to the concerts and meeting the friendly people amidst the bombed-out buildings. The rubble and the struggle of the people is especially heart wrenching.
William Holden is the prosecutor who does overact a bit but otherwise does a competent job, jumping up from his seat often with objections and having been at Dachau and other concentration camps has an especial hatred for Germans.
Marlene Dietrich, a wonderful classic actress who herself was German but left Germany before the Nazis came to power, played the perfect aristocrat who takes a liking to Dan. However, Dan is all professional and continues to poke and to prod, trying to understand the people who claim not to have known about the atrocities.
It is a great story of justification - is the fact that you "didn't know" a justification for the acts of criminals? Moreover, did the persons who were at these major cases, making judgments, any less guilty?
Judy Garland for some reason won Best Supporting Actress that year for Judgment at Nuremberg and I cannot see why. She does get overly emotional and does a great job of acting as the victim of the racial discrimination program by the Nazis. However, the award should have gone to Dietrich, who at the end of the film comes again to hate Americans as she sits with a drink in a darkened room boarded up because of bombed-out glass.
In addition, let's not forget Burt Lancaster as Ernst the Judge - the quiet competence, the dignity and yet the shock and dismay at what he had done - just following the laws of his land.
Maximillian Schell as the defense attorney really had his work cut out for him. He too goes overboard and overly emotional especially after the prosecuting attorney shows the films from the dead Jews being bulldozed into mass graves.
Trivia:
This film was one of the first to show the Jewish deaths, the gas chambers and the mass burials of decimated bodies at concentration camps. The images are stark!
I noted too that three of the actors later went on to become television stars. Howard Caine plays a small but important role as the father of the daughter who is being dragged into the courtroom to become witness to a celebrated case at the time. Howard went on to Hogan's Heroes, a situation comedy from the Sixties, ironically about Stalag 13 concentration camp for POW's, along with Werner Kemplerer, son of the famous composer Otto Kemplerer, as the bumbling Colonel Klink.
And one of the first appearances of William Shatner whom you all know (or should know) as captain of the starship Enterprise.
Awards:
The movie won the Academy Award for Best Actor (Maximilian Schell) and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium, and many others! A must-see, "lest we forget."
DVD:
Further info into the Nuremberg trials is presented as well as an interview with Max Schell and the writer of the screenplay, Abby Mann.
Movie Review: Overwhelming, alternately troubling and ennobling
Summary: 5 Stars
I have just watched this film on Turner Classics and I was unprepared for its combination of breadth and depth. It is a courtroom drama, but not limited to just the courtroom - the action takes place all across divided Germany. It is 1948, the Berlin Blockade and the American airlift. The film depicts the ever-present fear of the American military that at any moment the Soviet downing of an American aid plane might precipitate World War III, while the war crimes trials antagonize a German nation that now must be won over to "our side" against the Russians.
The chief American judge (Spencer Tracy) at a trial of Nazi jurists does not have the support of the American brass around him. After all, the lead Nazis have been tried, is it wise to continue? As an American officer tells the chief prosecutor, played by Richard Widmark, "if Germany is lost, Europe is lost."
Against this broad canvas, over the course of three hours, Abby Mann and Stanley Kramer probe the dark souls of more than a dozen men and women and how they responded to great evil. An astonishing cast - Tracy, Widmark, Burt Lancaster, Marlene Dietrich, Maximilian Schell, Montgomery Clift, Werner Klemperer and finally a heart-breaking Judy Garland - bring all these people to powerful or pitiable life.
Ruth Z. Deming in her review below writes that back then "we (Americans) were justly perceived as heroes, unlike today" when evil George Bush and Guantanamo ... But the film is not at all silly and simplistic like that: this is a Cold War world, complex and difficult, in which any choice the Americans make can have dire consequences. Spencer Tracy's judge is told that Americans are now no longer popular in Nuremberg. Lead defense attorney Rolfe (Maximiliam Schell) acidly comments that American's moral pretensions, after the firebombings and atomic bombings, are baseless. And Werner Klemperer's Nazi judge is confident that soon "the Bolsheviks will sentence you!"
This is a world, as Rolfe points out in court, in which Churchill had praised Hitler, Americans had sold him armaments, and Russia had signed a treaty to allow Germany to invade Poland. And Mann and Kramer show that, only three years after the Holocaust had ended, America and Russia were on the brink of horrific bloodshed all over again...
(spoiler)
Even at the climax, when the least guilty and most distinguished of the German jurists, Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster)finally accepts his guilt and complicity in judicial murder, there is no easy or sentimental ending. Sentenced to life in prison, Janning desperately wants the respect and understanding of the American judge he has come to admire. Chief Judge Haywood (Tracy) thinks highly of Janning's work and mind, but when the German implores, "you must understand ... millions of people ... I never thought it could come to that," Haywood cuts him right off: "The first time you sentence a man you know is innocent to death - it HAS come to that."
Yet Judge Haywood does not have the final victory. The American brass do not really support him: there is no reason to antagonize the Germans. The lead defense attorney confidently bets Haywood that his sentencing of even the vilest of these villains will not stand - and a note at the end tells us he was right.
Intellectually exciting and morally troubling, this is a very fine film.
Movie Review: "You should have known the first time..."
Summary: 5 Stars
"Judgment at Nuremberg" is a brilliantly understated meditation on the most ordinary man's capacity for unimaginable evil under the collective spell of notions like "nation" and "country".
As Chief Judge Dan Haywood, Spencer Tracy delivers one of the best performances in film history: he isn't some sentimental, saccharine moral pedant, but a man from Texas who has been given the particularly unpleasant task of sentencing the leftovers of the Nazi Regime--the judges and doctor--to whatever sentence he deems fit. Tracy's character is not, at the outset of the film, fully convinced of Germany's collective guilt and the beautiful Marlene Dietrich plays the foil to his sense of morality.
The gorgeous widow of a particularly influential and vicious SS officer who was court martialed and sentenced to death by firing squad by the man acting as prosecutor in the case of the three judges' Haywood is trying, she has developed a marked antipathy for Americans and their "absurd" insistance that the average German could have had any complicity or knowledge of what the Third Reich was doing with "socially undesirables" and Jews. Dietrich gives a chillingly convincing performance as a woman locked in self-denial and bitterness, and the scene in the nightclub has subtle, creeping echoes of the hatred that led to the decadence and madness of Hitler's "Final Solution".
Along with Tracy, Burt Lancaster makes this movie with his tortured performance as Dr. Ernst Janning, a former Nazi judge who, despite being a hero in his homeland before Hitler's rise to power, succumbed knowingly to the temptations and dubious benefits of the Nazi Terror. Unlike his co-defendants (one unrepentant fanatic and a coward who feigns insanity),
Janning is determined to keep his brilliant Defense Lawyer played by Maximillian Schell at bay and to acknowledge his inescapable role in the madness which swept Germany. He is a wasted, lost yet responsible man who makes one last bid for salvation through unflinching honesty.
The relationship between Haywood and Janning is symbolic in many ways--both are born to judge in the judicial sense and have done so for many years. The difference is that one maintained his sense of ethics even in the hardest of times and the other succumbed to the temptations of his horrific time period over the most basic judicial ethics and standard human compassion.
Despite the pressure of American military personnel to give these men (particularly Janning) lenient sentences because of the mistaken idea that the ongoing conflict with the Soviet Union might lead to the need for German military support (an obvious illusion in retrospect), Haywood does not waver and gives all three life imprisonment.
Unfortunately this film is not entirely historically accurate; many former Nazi Judges and doctors were acquitted during this period. The American public was apparently satisfied with the Nuremburg trials at which the figureheads of the Nazi Party were tried and hanged and wanted nothing more to do with it. After WWII, many in this country committed the understandable crime of wanting to forget, not wanting to know: history has revealed this to be the worst thing of all. All that
notwithstanding, this is an unforgettable, important, beautiful film.