A Resounding Power No Matter What Era In Which You See It

Rating: 10/10 (9 August 2010)

Tracy channels a refreshing patience as a humble Maine judge exported to don the gown of chief justice in a tribunal comprised of judges facing judges. Clearly, the scales should balance. He and his fellow adjudicators sit across from an even number of other adjudicators. One'd think they'd all see eye-to-eye. And yet, Judge Haywood finds himself indecisive of how four respected judges like himself could've passed sentences resulting in genocide, castration, ethnic cleansing and ultimately, how an entire country could be permissive of these atrocities. The film's his teeming, deliberate process of making up his mind.
The black-and-white cinematography emphatically reflects the courtroom environment's utter formality and procedure. Each and every shot's perfectly balanced in equal terms of space, overlapping planes, converging focus. One shot's repeated constantly, the slowly revolving camera fixed on its subject then crash-zooming into that character at a point of rising vigor in his/her monologue. It's very effective, but the sudden crash-zoom's repeated use, rather than once, twice at most, begins feeling rather arbitrary. Why this point in a speech rather than that? Lancaster, though sounding quasi-transatlantically staccato rather than actually German, has the still, silent ferment that brings his symbolic purpose to full impact. For two hours, he's essentially silent, motionless; in the third, he accosts us with one of the most telling, socially aware, discomfortingly honest monologues ever performed. I suspect his character's a symbol because his omnipotent speech condemning himself and his fellow defendants for complicity in the Reich, that it's not that they didn't know the truth but that they didn't want to know, is something that must've been, probably still is, a feeling running to the existential core of many Germans. Yet it doesn't stop there: Why do we Americans support our leaders in punishing minorities, preemptive attacks, an ever-deepening divide between classes? When Lancaster's finished, in another of Kramer's blatant demonstrations of balancing scales, Schell follows his defendant by raising Churchill's premature praise of Hitler, the Vatican's platform of approval. He also mentions earlier an American Supreme Court justice's support of eugenics.
It's difficult not feeling a strong connection to Garland as Schell cross-examines her. She bares such pitiful vulnerability, nearly crumbles before our eyes. In a movie constructed mainly of extensive monologue, this scene's comparatively short, yet provokes an impact unique to any of these other powerhouse scenes. The point, seemingly, in the film's larger scope, is not merely her agony but Schell's ruthlessness. In even broader terms, we find that despite Schell's brutally controlling provocation of witnesses, he's not a monster but a great defense attorney, as well as a man of logic fully aware of his courtroom function and as a human being battling his inexorable personal stakes in his defendants' guilt or innocence.
Indeed, no central character's either hero or monster. None entirely understand the macrocosmic fulcrum in which they're entrenched. One may find the scenes outside the courtroom dull by comparison, that they could be omitted to streamline the action, mainly where Haywood befriends Dietrich's level-headed German war-widow, who gives him her perspective on the war. But in a film constructed completely on counterweight and parallels, there must be Germans causing suffering, and Germans caused to suffer. Just as there are evenhanded Americans like Haywood and vengeful Americans like Widmark's prosecutor.
The nature of Clift's posture, his utter wariness against the past, his debilitating anxiety and feebleness, the texture of his accent, is entrancing. Perhaps it's distasteful to suggest that his deteriorating health and looks resulting from his mid-1950s car wreck was a perk in his later performances, but here, I believe because we associate him with the sublimely handsome young man of I Confess and A Place in the Sun, there's something so tragically off-kilter about him here. But it's not merely the physical post-accident impact, it's equally the devastating vulnerability he carries from a truly pain-filled life that he dauntlessly brings to his astonishing early scene as a truly sympathetic character.
The movie's massive in the breadth of its questions of individual complicity in government crimes. Where's the end to the blame? There's no doubt that the men on trial here are guilty. They supported a bigoted, oppressive war machine. But then that must mean that those who supported the men on trial are guilty, and also their supporters' supporters, and so on. What we find at the roots of these apparent sometime advocates of Hitler's regime is altogether a stockpile of rationalization and justification deriving straight from nationalistic pride. "Above all, there was fear," Lancaster's Ernst Janning defiantly divulges. "Only when you understand that can you understand what Hitler meant to usWhat about those of us who knew the words were lies and worse than lies? Why did we sit silent, take part? Because we loved our country! What difference does it make if a few political extremists lose their rights, if a few racial minorities lose their rights? It's only a passing phase. It's only a stage we are going through." And so on.
It isn't just mammoth monologues that gush with subtext, it's also single-sentence replies, such as when Haywood's told, "Those millions of peopleI never knew it'd come to that," to which he responds, "It came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent." That the film ends on that line is a clear alarm bell that this film's not merely an indictment of the Nazis, but the severest warning to all human beings of judiciary positions everywhere. I know that it's become a tired hat-trick to compare any political state of affairs you don't like to Hitler's Reich (I'm talking to you, Beck), but let's be realistic here: What will happen if a government's legal system secures patriotism and nationalism as higher obligations than pure justice?