The Greatest Generation - on Film

Rating: 10/10 (1 May 2011)

I have watched this movie countless times since it came out in 1961 when I was 16. My father and I often watched and commented on movies that delved deeply into character and ethical issues. It was his way of sharing and discussing his most fervent beliefs and values - and I did the same for 40 years of teaching: using film to augment literature and life issues.
I was struck today by the fact, not terribly original of me to say so, that human beings who have surmounted periods of incredible destruction, sorrow, hatred, intolerance and devastation - like The Great Depression and World War II - seem now to me to be larger than life. I'm now in a Prayer Group that includes four ladies who range from 76-95. Conversations with them are flesh-and-blood history lessons.
We have good actors and actresses today. But we do not have a Spencer Tracy, a Cary Grant, a Marlene Dietrich. Perhaps movies are the artistic repository not merely of art on film - but of a particular epoch, a particular ethos of a society or even of a civilization.
I think it is that set of viewpoints that "Judgement at Nuremberg" managed to capture. It is a movie that each succeeding generation should view, consider, discuss and incorporate in their thinking.
The film made me grateful that, in the 1930's in America, we did not have a figure like Adolf Hitler emerge to cause the "fever" and the "disease" that Jannings refers to in his long somber speech. But when I hear some of our leaders and would-be leaders telling Americans what they think we want to hear - instead of what we really need to hear -not quite so pleasant to be told to (a) live within your means (b) save and (c) invest - Add a potent mixture of intolerance,hatred, and especially rampant, pervasive fear - and where would America be? When power and winning surmount truth, the national cauldron, the crucible of politics, economics, education, all that we devote our lives to could curdle, fester and poison; and that process would be most terrifying and most dramatic in the minds of our youth, the Jungen Hitler turned into vicious tattle-tales spying on, ratting on and sending even their own parents to the gibbet or the concentration camp.
The movie gave me a chill. It can always happen again. Anywhere. Anytime.