Wildly overrated

Rating: 2/10 (4 October 2005)

Judgment at Nuremburg is a well-made and well-acted film, with some stirring speeches. However, in the end it presents an incredibly rhetorical and propagandist perspective on these trials. For instance: there is a serious legal question as to the authority by which the US puts the Nazis on trial. Of course. what the defendants did was horrific, and they ought to have been held accountable for it, but was it illegal? By what law? By whose law? Shouldn't there be a distinction between acting against a Nazi law and acting against a moral law? Aren't we really looking at a sort of self-righteous 'victor's justice'? Shouldn't these questions be settled politically or by force, rather than with a veneer of pseudo-legalisms?
At the beginning of the movie, it seems sensitive to this question. The prosecutor seems over-zealous. The defense lawyer seems earnest. By the end, any opponent of the procedure of the trial (like the dissenting judge) is racist Nazi or an equivalently immoral patriotic American. Any subtle thought that, for instance, there is something funny about holding someone responsible for enforcing the laws of their own country is assimilated to racism and Nazism.
To add insult to injury, the movie can't even bear to have a heroic German figure. Janning, who gives the crucial testimony in the case, ends up trying to excuse himself in the end--in a way entirely inconsistent with his earlier speech and everything we know about his character.
Don't be taken in by this movie. It doesn't want you to think. It wants to bully you, with all the heavy-handed tricks a movie-maker has, into thinking that all patriots are Nazis and that legal niceties can be run roughshod over if some pure vision of morality demands it. It's really too bad, because the moral and legal issues connected with the trials are very serious and very relevant today.