One can't hate this movie, but

Rating: 7/10 (11 August 1999)

One can't hate this movie, but one has to regret that it never quite fulfills the promise of its best moments. These include not only the finely etched performances of Dietrich and Schell, but also the deep irony that dogs a passionate prosecution of crimes that America itself committed then, and commits today; crimes to which America was indifferent in the shadow of the cold war. Schell's invocation of Oliver Wendell Holmes for the defense should (but undoubtedly doesn't) give pause to the seemingly innumerable contemporary supporters of eugenics. It was my first exposure to the filmed records of Shoah (I was about 12 when I first saw the movie) and those images can never, I hope, be erased. And yet, and yet--it is so dull, it is so cut to fit the formulae of Hollywood; and, as other commenters have pointed it, it has Tracy at his pompous predictable liberal worst, rehearsing Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. His best scenes are as Dietrich's foil; the very best when he is the excuse for her commentary on Lili Marlene.
This is painfully close to a great movie; its failure is especially sad because its subject calls for greatness.