The Complainant At the Bar is Civilization Itself

Rating: 10/10 (25 November 2006)

Following a trail first started by Marty, Judgment at Nuremberg is one of the first films to be taken from television. Abby Mann wrote this script for a live drama on Playhouse 90. Only Maximilian Schell and Werner Klemperer repeated their roles from the 1959 production. Others in that cast were Claude Rains as Judge Haywood and Paul Lukas as the defendant Ernest Janning.
Stanley Kramer assembled a cast of some big movie names for his film and directed this film reverently as it has an eternal message. To get the film out of the Nuremberg Tribunal courtroom, the role of the widow of the German general played by Marlene Dietrich was created and the other German citizens were also created show that Kramer could get some dialog in about how the ordinary German felt. In the original play their only advocate is defense lawyer Maximilian Schell.
Schell is some good advocate indeed. While not lessening the guilt of any of the four German judges in the dock, he does raise some disturbing questions about other societies and how very easily the slide into totalitarian brutality can happen. He also shows some of the worst aspects in German character in his cross examination of Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift.
The Nuremberg Tribunal has been going on four two years now. The big Nazi fish have been dealt with and we're now trying four German judges who apparently forgot all about due process in their efforts to ingratiate themselves with the new Nazi regime. Clift and Garland are two examples of German everypeople who got caught up in it and their performances well merited Oscar nominations in the Supporting player categories.
Richard Widmark is the lead prosecutor and this is probably one of the least complex roles Widmark ever played. He's identified as a New Deal liberal, a protégé of the late President Roosevelt. He was in at the liberation of concentration camps and it effected him. It made him the good advocate for civilization itself.
In an original cast album of the film, the monologues with Burt Lancaster confessing his guilt and Spencer Tracy rendering the verdicts were included. Lancaster in a smaller way plays the part of Albert Speer who probably escaped the hangman by just throwing himself on the mercy of the court. He's the only one who shows contrition. His confession though is a textbook example of how a demagogue can come to power in a nation left without pride.
Spencer Tracy and Maximilian Schell got Academy Award nominations for Best Actor with Schell winning. But Tracy's summation of the trial is devastatingly correct. The real complainant at the bar is civilization itself as he so eloquently states. No player before or since has ever done so many lengthy speeches in his films and done them so well. This is the best of them, a creed for civilization that we as humans should all live by.
In some of the smaller roles take note of some good performances by Virginia Christine as Tracy's housekeeper, Werner Klemperer as the unrepentant Nazi judge, and Howard Caine as Judy Garland's husband who does not want her victimized all over again on the witness stand. A real cross section of the German public circa 1948.
Judgment at Nuremberg should be seen back to back with Schindler's List as a portrayal of the brutality itself and how civilization tried to deal with the consequences. Judgement at Nuremberg is a film whose message will never not be timely.