"Those damned Eskimos"

Rating: 9/10 (15 November 2009)

An exploding swastika over Nuremberg's Palace of Justice heralds the start of this blistering true-life courtroom drama, adapted from a television play and filmed in the Bavarian city itself - as uncomfortably evidenced by the ruins beyond the court steps.
By 1948, Hitler and his chief cronies were history - by their own hands or those of the Allies. No less important a trial than those that condemned Goering et al in 1946, this one concerned America's "judging of the judges" - four facilitators of Nazi rule - to ask: were these bureaucrats any more or any less accountable? Or were they, in that clapped out-excuse, "only following orders"? It's clear Chief Judge Dan Haywood (Tracy) has an awesome task on his hands.
A former provincial district attorney, we learn Hayward has been "retired forcibly by the electorate" and, in accepting his unenviable role, been handed something of a poisoned chalice. "Now we're down to the business of judging the doctors, businessmen and judges" he tells his aide (a youthful William Shatner). "Some people think they shouldn't be judged at all." Tracy imbues Hayward with great integrity and searching intellect behind his Southern hick, self-effacing persona, along with a weary demeanour, as if he carries the entire weight of history on his back. Confidants are found in unlikely places - Madame Bertholt (a poignant Dietrich), the proud widow of an executed Nazi general, whose house he has borrowed for the trial's duration, lends him unlikely succour.
"I wish you understood German" she says at one point, translating Lili Marlene for him. "The words are very beautiful. Very sad. Much sadder than the English ones. The German soldier knows he's going to lose his girl and his life. 'The lantern burns every night, it knows your steps and the way you walk. It burns every night, but I've been long forgotten. Should harm come to me, who will stand with you? Under the lantern, with you, Lili Marlene?" She also insists all the while that the German public knew nothing about the Final Solution. "As far as I can make out, no one in this country knows," Haywood counters, with barely-concealed disgust.
Foremost among the wretched judges on trial is Dr Ernst Janning (Lancaster), whose face, at first an impassive blank, becomes a tragic mask as his self-justification finally crumbles away. Richard Widmark plays presiding zealot Colonel Tad Lawson, the Prosecuting Attorney obsessed with extinguishing every last ember of the Third Reich, but whose finest scenes are actually those outside the courtroom. He certainly makes a convincing drunk. "There are no Nazis in Germany" he rails at one point. "The Eskimos invaded Germany and took over, that's how all these terrible things happened. It wasn't the fault of the Germans - it was those damned Eskimos!"
A pair of real-life Hollywood casualties, Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift respectively, also turn in memorable cameos as prosecution witnesses, despite being ravaged by drink and drugs by the time of filming (Clift ruined take after take by forgetting his lines). Despite his chronic alcoholism, Clift hits the right notes here, with his pitiful portrayal of a mentally-subnormal Communist sympathiser, sterilised by the Nazis as part of their eugenics policy.
But it's Schell as Leading Defence Attorney Hans Rolfe, who produces the greatest performance here, and one for which he deservedly won his Best Actor Oscar over fellow nominees Tracy and Clift. Loathed by Janning yet desperate to protect his clients at all costs - and Germany even more so - Rolfe's hypnotic and blistering rhetoric neatly articulates the world's complicity in Hitler's ascendancy.