It's Still All About Complacency!

Rating: 8/10 (4 March 2004)

While I seem to never tire of the Holocaust as a subject...it's both grotesque and fascinating for me to read accounts (especially first hand) of the way in which humans treated other humans during this war...I am tired of Holocaust movies. Most of them are terribly slanted to make the enemy evil and the victims righteous. I take exception to films that make all Germans look bad. I have German relatives and friends from both sides of the war and their story is so much more complex than a single movie or book could ever portray. Like most middle class Americans, genocide is a difficult phenomenon for me to comprehend. It terrifies and upsets me but at the same time I am overwhelmingly compelled to find out why and how it actually happened(s.)
I grew up in New York and have friends who's parents are camp survivors. Most of these people do not talk about the war. Nor do my relatives and friends who fought on the American side or my husband's relatives who were imprisoned or almost starved to death surviving against the grain of Hitler's regime. Also, I know from first hand experience most Germans do not talk about this war either. I think because it is so unbelievable painful that it's easier just to try to forget it. But of course, forgetting it is the very thing people should never do! I really hate the recent Holocaust denial sub-text going on around the world. It frightens me to think that people actually believe the extermination of millions of people never happened! And film is the perfect media to insure that genocide...be it Jews and Gypsies, Cambodian and Laotians, Tutsis in Rwanda, Serbs in Kosovo, and history's indigenous peoples every where...is never forgotten or tolerated. Therefore, I am recommending this movie with aplomb, as I think it was well made and has been sorely overlooked for too long.
Born in 1952 , I was not alive when these events took place and it is my guess that this particular rendition of The Justice or "Nazi Judges" Trial Case No. 3 is only partially based on fact. Still, 'Judgment at Nuremberg' is really worthy of our attention. Like 'Schindler's List,' another good holocaust movie, it is filmed in black and white. This falsely gave me the impression it was made right after the war, when in fact, it was filmed in 1961. It is 3 hours long and maybe should have been edited but I am glad it was not. Although, it did drag... I liked the sequences in which an older Spencer Tracy (Chief Judge Dan Haywood) walks around the city (scene of the crime as it were) trying to 'assimilate' the era in an attempt to understand culpability. I also felt the documentary footage of actual camp and street violence while painfully inevitable...was highly educational. Especially for those of us who were not around when it all happened.
There are so many note worthy actors in this movie! Made back in the days when studios tried to get as many big names in a movie as possible...you will be amazed at the talent. Oscar winning Maximillian Schell creates a magnificent achievement as the defense attorney for Dr. Ernst Janning played very subtly by Burt Landcaster. There are numerous other well know actors involved in this court room drama...Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift give somewhat deflated performances as witnesses for the prosecution...which is kind of ironic because both of their careers were also pretty flat by the time this movie was made. Judy looks drugged, which she probably was and Montgomery Clift actually got an Oscar nod for playing a crazed bug eyed idiot...which IMHO is not really acting on his part. Also, there is an incredible role with a straight Marlene Dietrich portraying a once prominent member of German nobility and a war widow,who tries to enlighten Spencer Tracy's character to the fact that not all Germans were monsters. I loved just having another chance to see her on screen. There's even a small but funny...in a hind sight kind of way...bit part in which a much younger and less arrogant William Shatner plays Judge Haywood's Aide. Like I said...what a cast!
In the end of the movie as in the end of the war...it all comes down to culpability! Some of the worst Nazi offenders were never put on trial(The Fuhrer, Heinrich Himmler, Bormann, and Joseph Goebbels) which is felonious given the tremendous human suffering they instigated. But this movie is not about the big gun offenders...it's about the every day complacency of folks just doing their jobs...which was then and now the culprit for many a crime against humanity...not to mention full scale genocide.