Verdict Guilty -- Defendants AND Movie

Rating: 5/10 (24 November 2003)

SPOILERS.
I watch this once in a while if it happens to be on TV because the performances are as good as they are. Tracy is the epitome of rock-ribbed Republican rectitude. Widmark is good. Maximilian Schell is nothing less than great. He deserved his awards. Burt Lancaster should avoid any part that calls for an accent unless the movie is a comedy. But Garland and Monty Clift are truly pathetic, for more reasons than the script gives them.
But that's the problem with the movie -- the script. The trial is a court set up in such a way that we must fight the values behind World-War-Two Germany all over again. Except for Lancaster's character the defendants are inhuman caricatures. Werner Klemperer is compelled to be a malignant version of Colonel Klink. The others are plain nasty. And Schell must try to get them off by defending their actions, which is impossible. The best he can do for Lancaster is to argue that Lancaster knew the justice system was rotten but was determined to minimize the harm it did by working against it from the inside, occasionally letting rotten things happen because the rottenness was prescribed by the law. If you think about it, that's kind of what a judge is supposed to do, isn't it? See that the law is carried out? Here's how two analysts posed the dilemma: "The criminal law usually punishes people that break laws, not carry them out. The responsibility imposed by such a standard requires a judge to choose between resigning immediately or becoming an international criminal if he enforces an unjust law or becoming a German criminal if he refuses to enforce it. This is a lot to ask of anyone." (Bergman and Isamov, "Reel Justice," 1996.)
But it's best not to think too hard about this movie. Some idea of its self-congratulatory and self-righteous nature is given by Abby Mann's speech when he won the academy award, accepting it not only for himself but "for all intellectuals everywhere." Really.
He's very mistaken if he actually believes that this movie is in any way "intellectual." It doesn't invite analysis. It invites judgment based on hatred of the Nazis. Or, let's be honest about it, hatred of Germans. There isn't a good German in it. Tracy's butler and his wife seem compliant and obedient but "we knew nothing of what was going on." Then there is Marlene Dietrich, cultivated and intelligent and helpful and friendly towards Tracy. When the guilty verdict comes in, her true nature reveals itself and she refuses to answer his phone call, sitting alone in the dark, filled with the kind of anger that brought Hitler to power. (The Germans will never change, not even the best of them.)
Tracy has a last jailhouse conversation with Lancaster, at Lancaster's request. Burt has been mute throughout most of the trial, refusing to speak in his own defense, but here he tries to tell Tracy, as one morally upright man to another, that he, Lancaster, didn't know Germany was going to turn into what it did. Tracy sneers at him and says, "You knew what was going to happen the first time you sent an innocent man to jail." That's judgment at Nurenberg for you.
The movie never asks what a moral person might do in Lancaster's circumstances. Mann and Kramer don't bother to ask because they already know the answer. The rest of us may not be quite so sure what we might do because we are aware of our moral flaws, our weaknesses, our desire to get along trying to do well without stepping on too many toes or striking useless heroic poses. But the writer and director haven't really thought about it.
The worst scene in the movie, perhaps, among so many, has Schell grilling Judy Garland (Judy Garland!), who as a young girl had some innocent dalliance with an elderly Jew who was then convicted of consorting with Aryans and was disappeared. The most damning evidence was that she'd been seen sitting on the man's lap. She stutters neurotically while Schell bears down on her and he finally shouts at her -- "DID YOU -- SIT -- ON -- HIS -- LAP???" Enough is enough, finally.
I really dislike this movie for its fake humanitarianism. The victims were innocent, but does that make all of their countrymen evil? That's the kind of stereotypica, digital, black-and-white thinking that will lead to the next war, the next genocide. If the Nazis hadn't existed we would be almost forced to invent them because as a society we need bad examples. Without evil, how can we possibly convince ourselves that we are good? So we can all leave the theater or switch off the TV, eyes brimming with tears at the tragedy that has been brought to our attention again, cheapened though it is by this film, and go to bed glowing with self satisfaction.