Essential Courtroom Drama Questions the Accountability of WWII War Crimes Via a Powerful Cast

Rating: 9/10 (7 April 2008)

Screenwriter Abby Mann and actor Richard Widmark died within a day of each other just this past week, which makes a revisit with this eminently powerful 1961 courtroom drama all the more appropriate. At an epic-length 186 minutes, the movie is a fictionalized account of one of the many trials held after WWII before the U.S. Nuremberg Military Tribunal, this one the 1948 trial of four Nazi judges who used their power to enable the Third Reich to conduct experiments upon Jewish prisoners, and had accountability for murder, brutalities, torture, and other atrocities directed toward the Jews. Directed by Stanley Kramer ("The Defiant Ones", "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner"), the king of socially conscious cinema in the late fifties and sixties, the film digs deeply into the ethics of assigning war crimes responsibility to individuals.
The heavyweight cast is the primary draw here. With his quiet authority, Spencer Tracy plays Chief Judge Dan Haywood who has the unenviable task of presiding over the tribunal. For the prosecution is attorney Col. Tad Lawson, who shows actual footage from the devastating remains of the German concentration camps when they were liberated. Widmark plays Lawson with equal parts grit and petulance. Defense attorney Hans Rolfe is portrayed by a young Maximilian Schell in a volcanic performance as his character raises valid questions on the degree of the defendants' accountability. As the trial moves along, two key episodes dominate the proceedings with two icons playing near-cameo roles. A fidgety Montgomery Clift plays a mentally unstable victim of Nazi sterility measures, and a downcast Judy Garland is an Aryan hausfrau accused of having sexual relations with a Jew, a crime punishable by death for the Jew guilty of "racial pollution". Kramer draws out brilliant turns on the stand by both actors.
Burt Lancaster plays Ernst Janning, the only one Among the four defendants who shows a trace of a conscience given his aristocratic background and known early resistance to the Third Reich. Even with aging make-up, the strapping actor appears physically wrong for the mostly passive role, but he manages to deliver his final testimony with knowing conviction. One of the other judges is a surprisingly vituperative Werner Klemperer memorable later as the befuddled Col. Klink on TV's "Hogan's Heroes", and also in the supporting cast is a young William Shatner, well before "Star Trek", as Haywood's aide. The legendary Marlene Dietrich plays a somewhat ancillary role as German widow Frau Bertholt, whose husband was put to death by Haywood for war crimes. In their key scene together, she and Tracy provide the film's most humane moments amid the unrelenting tension of the trial.
Mann's script is superbly drawn out even if Kramer's ponderous direction can get a bit sluggish at times. The extras on the 2004 DVD are most worthwhile. First up is a twenty-minute conversation between Mann and Schell ("In Conversation with Abby Mann and Maximilian Schell"), where they talk extensively about not only the film but also the earlier "Playhouse 90" TV version and the 2001 Broadway production (in which Schell played Janning). There are two other shorts  a six-minute dissection of the script by Mann ("The Value of a Single Human Being") and a 14-minute featurette about Kramer consisting primarily of interviews with his widow Karen ("A Tribute to Stanley Kramer"). There is also a photo gallery and the original theatrical trailer. I wish the DVD included the original TV version, but this is a superb telling of a most devastating episode in mankind's recent history.