The Bright Line of Guilt, Blurred

Rating: 9/10 (21 August 2016)

In spite of the outstanding cast, their captivating performances, and the expert direction of Stanley Kramer, this film is very disturbing for many different reasons. I sat down and listed at least a few of the reasons.
1. It reveals the indisputable fact that so many high level officials in the Third Reich eventually were allowed to enjoy the carefree lives of retirement from which their millions of victims were deprived by the most cruel and inhumane means imaginable. In fact, how many of these high level Third Reich officials were even tried in the first place? We should not expect any true sense of justice in our world, which is very unsettling by itself.
2. Defense Attorney Hans Rolfe, played forcefully by Maximillian Schell in an Oscar winning role, is correct. The guilt for the genocide that occurred in Europe during World War II extends far beyond Germany alone. The human race itself is guilty not only for directly committing unspeakable acts of cruelty against itself but for allowing others to exercise such brutality when it was clearly known by so many all over the world at the time. The situation exists today while hundreds of thousands of people, including many innocent civilians, are dying in the Syrian civil war, for example, while certain so-called "leaders" of the world not only refuse to stop it but consciously support and promote its barbarity. We're not talking about the distant past in this case. It's happening today.
3. As the established laws of the Third Reich were in themselves cruel and inhumane, how much should we expect from the average person in any official position when the prevailing law of the land is intrinsically evil as well as enormously powerful? When I look around me today, how many respectable Americans in the place of Ernst Janning, played brilliantly by Burt Lancaster as a renown legal scholar of his time, would actively resist such a formidable system of malevolence? Who among us would be strong enough to fight such an overwhelming, sinister establishment without fear of dire and deadly consequences? Ernst Janning surely did not resist the Third Reich as he willingly and knowingly carried out its despicable laws.
4. In spite of the huge sacrifices of so many Americans on and off the battlefield of World War II, many Americans also believed, as Judge Curtiss Ives (Ray Teal) did, that these high German officials, in this case very influential judges, were "merely" applying the prevailing laws of their government as they were supposed to do, regardless of how nefarious those laws were, and therefore should not be punished at all. Chief Judge Dan Haywood, the no-nonsense and often very blunt Mainer, played very sagaciously by Spencer Tracy, reminded Ives that mere logic and the professional duty to enforce evil laws did not overrule the need to do what is right before an even higher authority or to one's own conscience. Unfortunately Ives, who obviously resented the inconvenience of his appointment to the tribunal from the very start, totally rejected Haywood's prudent observations. Was he even listening to Haywood? If Teal, the actor, was supposed to annoy me to such an extreme, he certainly succeeded.
5. The war caused immense physical and psychological suffering, not only to the brutalized victims of the Third Reich but to the German people themselves. If they had starved and deteriorated as a society to such an extent following the first world war, wasn't there another path to their recovery than the one that they had consciously chosen as a nation?
The fact that Nuremberg was the site of huge, enthusiastic rallies led by Adolph Hitler never escaped the mind of the director, Stanley Kramer, and he very effectively reminded the viewer of this irony. Kramer also emphasized that Schell's and Lancaster's speeches were the most important in the courtroom by dramatically zooming in and out of them. Under the circumstances, I wonder if this technique was even necessary.
Aside from the first-rate performances of Schell, Lancaster, and Tracy, I was especially impressed by Marlene Dietrich's portrayal of Mrs. Bertholt, the refined widow of an executed German officer. To me, Mrs. Bertholt, of noble stock, effectively symbolized a shattered, post-World War II Germany in more ways than one. As she sat in the frozen silence of the last scene, what could have been passing through her embittered mind as the phone continued to ring unanswered? Although Mrs. Berthold felt an unbearable, personal sense of injustice as a result of the war, did she even begin to understand her own responsibility as an upstanding German citizen while atrocities on a mass scale were being committed in her name and from every direction around her? Did she not know or did she choose not to know about them? For Ms. Dietrich, who actively opposed the politics of the Third Reich but never abandoned a deep love for her native country and culture, this was a very important and emotional moment in her career. I could feel her quiet intensity, veiled in social correctness, throughout her performance.
Not all great movies have happy endings with clear resolutions. This movie, truly a great one, may not have had even one genuinely happy moment within it, but it must be seen by all who seek to understand the circumstances behind one of the most traumatic periods in human history. If there are no clear answers, we still need to ask the many, necessary questions. If we don't ask them, we risk repeating the mistakes and the horrors of the past.