Judgment at Nuremberg
The origins of the film were a teleplay by Abby Mann that ran on Playhouse 90, and starred unknown actor Maximilian Schell as the defense attorney. After seeing the show, Spencer Tracy wanted to do it, and got Kramer to direct. Kramer, well known for making socially conscious films like The Defiant Ones and Inherit the Wind, was a natural for this uncompromising look at an extraordinary time in history.
Instead of dramatizing the more sensational first trial, which tried big names like Goering, Mann concentrated on a less well-known trial of judges, reasoning that these men, who knew the law, were more fascinating defendants. They were tried for sentencing innocent people to concentration camps, and sterilizing people for political purposes.
Tracy starred as the chief judge of a three-man tribunal. Schell reprised his role as the defense attorney, and earned an Oscar for Best Actor (Tracy was nominated). A large cast of famous actors included Richard Widmark as the prosecuting attorney, Marlene Dietrich as a German woman and widow of an executed German officer who befriends Tracy, Burt Lancaster as one of the defendants, and in glorified cameos, Montgomery Clift and Judy Garland as witnesses for the prosecution. Both Clift and Garland also earned Oscar nominations.
The star of this film, though, is Mann's script, which also won an Oscar and deservedly so. It's not a flag-waving damnation of the German people, considering both sides quite eloquently. Schell's defense is multi-pronged: the judges involved were carrying out the law for the good of their country; they didn't make the law. In a big speech toward the end he also points out that there is plenty of room for assigning blame, from the Vatican, who signed an accord with Hitler in 1933, to American industrialists, who profited by supplying Germany with the mechanisms of their horror. Mann, in an interview on the DVD, cites the villain of the film as patriotism, an audacious thing to say, but one that has a lot of truth in it. So many atrocities have been committed in the name of patriotism that it backs Oscar Wilde's quote: "Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious."
Mann also turns the tables more than once. Widmark makes a passionate speech against forced sterilization, to which Schell responds by quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes, who wrote a decision that upheld sterilization of the mentally incompetent. Mann didn't go the full route when discussing a case that involved the sexual relationship between Aryans and non-Aryans; he could have had Schell point out that the exact same laws existed against miscegenation at the time in the U.S.
The film has all the earmarks of live television, with a limited set, and almost every character gets a big speech. But they are all knocked out of the park. I'm not sure if Lancaster's speech, in which he announces his guilt, was better than Tracy's reading of the decision, or Schell's previously mentioned speech. Clift and Garland are also quite good in their brief roles, as the former, his once matinee idols look damaged by a car crash, squirms on the stand as he testifies about being sterilized, or the latter, her days as America's sweetheart behind her, portraying an unglamorous woman who was jailed for supposing to have a relationship with an elderly Jewish man.
In addition to the big stars in the cast, there are a few notable film debuts: Werner Klemperer, who would end up starring as Col. Klink in Hogan's Heroes, played the nastiest defendant, and William Shatner was the judge's assistant.
In some of the supplemental material, it states that actual films of the concentration camps were shown to the public for the first time in this film. I don't believe that that's true--The Stranger, from 1946, beat it by 11 years.
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