Court drama in postwar Germany

Rating: 9/10 (12 August 2016)

Directed by Stanley Kramer, this movie is the story of a great courtroom drama involving judges of Nazi Germany. The judges, including a great jurist who became the Minister of Justice, administered laws aimed at imposing racial purity and mandatory sterilization. Human beings were treated as pawns in the hands of these men in the name of the Nazi state. The presiding judge, played superbly by Spencer Tracey, is a model of integrity. In the role of the former minister of justice is Burt Lancaster, a cut above the other small-minded tyrants who had no conscience in carrying out their cruel sentences to produce the master race. Despite his character and his great legal mind, he too was complicit in the tragedy. In fact, his sharp sense of revulsion about these crimes, made him even more repellant as he went against his own conscience and training. The other cast members include Maximilian Schell as the defence attorney, Richard Widmark as the prosecuting attorney, Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift as key witnesses as well as victims, and Marlene Dietrich as the widow of wartime criminal already executed. All the cast are outstanding. While the story is overly long, we get a strong sense of the characters and how Tracey as a judge lived and mingled with the people of Nuremberg during his time in the occupied post-war country. The director, Stanley Kramer, made movies that showed people of conscience in conflict with the established order. He made use of great acting talents like Burt Lancaster and Spencer Tracey to issue strong statements of principle. This movie is a prime example of his great legacy as a director.