Rent Judgement at Nuremberg (1961)

A Warning to the World - Judgement at Nuremberg review by QOW

This is an incredible film. What are the implications of the decisions that we are making in the world today? What started as a temporary measure created fertile ground to spawn unthinkable atrocities. Can it happen again? This will certainly make you think.

Soul-searching Courtroom Drama - Judgement at Nuremberg review by CV

Writing a review concerning a crucial and heart-searching courtroom drama, which had ensuing profound moral and political implications, seems very strange while at the present moment leaders of the once national victors of WWII are riding roughshod over their own legal procedures. What on earth would those officers of law make of our travesty of government today?

Four former German judges practising under the Nazi regime are charged with complicity and knowledge of the mass extermination programme instigated under Hitler. The prosecution is naturally visceral and passionate including horrific images of the death camps being shown on film during the procedures. But the defence draws attention to the hypocrisy of the allied nations who one way or another have supported Hitler's regime before armed conflict and compares the atrocity of the devastation of the atom bombs with that of the concentration camps.

The case is conducted during the beginning of the Cold War(1949) and it is of paramount importance that the West can rely on German co-operation if things turn adverse in the East. Germany needs to regain self-respect and credibility in order to resist communism and so the verdict on the four once eminent German judges is a very sensitive issue.

The strength of the drama itself rests on a triumvirate of great American actors of the past: Spencer Tracy, Richard Widmark and Burt Lancaster as one of the German judges.

Challenging, Daunting, Magnetic Watching - Judgement at Nuremberg review by AP

That's a pretty OTT title, but a not altogether inaccurate assessment of my response to this film.

Three American judges, led by Daniel Haywood played convincingly by Spencer Tracy, sit in judgment at the Nuremburg triasl on four Nazi judges, one of whom is an out-and-out unremorseful Nazi and two of whom are older men with small reserves of personal moral integrity - just ordinary men, in fact, whose legal careers have gone with the flow and who were clearly too frightened by Hitler's regime to resist it. The fourth, Ernst Janner, played perhaps a little woodenly by Burt Lancaster, is a different kettle of fish. He is an internationally renowned jurist who adapted to the version of justice wrought by National Socialism, tried to moderate its excesses, but nevertheless, on the basis that a judge is an upholder of the country's laws, allowed himself to be compelled by law to condemn many to death or imprisonment.

The narrative, naturally, focuses on the trial in which the passionate American prosecutor is confronted by an equally passionate young German counsel for the defence keen to argue that if the defendants are guilty then so are the German people who allowed Hitler to come to power, as well as many other non-German parties. The legal arguments are sometimes hard to follow - a rewatching would be worthwhile, though a single watching was harrowing enough for me - and the moral arguments are too, but it struck me that the script is fashioned realistically to present the situation as dismayingly complex. Certainly, for me, Tracy displays the difficulties - legal, moral, personal and, as the film progresses, political - that a judge, who is also a human being, faces in a case like this, and the audience is encouraged to experience the same. Indeed, it is revealed after judgment has been passed on the four defendants that one judge dissented, and he is allowed to state his point of view. Justice is not easy to administer.

I mentioned Tracy's personal difficulties. These are exacerbated by his romantic interest in Mrs Berholt, played with Prussian dignity by Marlene Dietrich. She is the widow of career soldier, General Berholt, recently tried and executed. Hers is a character forged in a military family, one of personal control. She does not see her husband as a bad man, and the script allows her to make the case for a justice based on a system in which mercy tempers the strict rigour of the law. There is a telling moment when the trial is over and Tracy telephones her to say goodbye: the camera shows her resolutely sitting by the telephone, in the shadows, letting it ring. A similar technique is used when Kramer introduces Judy Garland's character, a German woman who, when 16, was convicted by Janner for breaking the race laws by kissing her Jewish landlord and sitting on his lap. Shadows perhaps represent the moral difficulties of the whole trial.

The film is a minute under 3 hours. It's rare for me to watch something that long without a break: that I did is testament to its narrative drive and the power of its acting. There is a seriousness about the performances: it's not laid on with a trowel, but the actors seem to me to have grasped that this is a drama in which you serve the script by letting it inhabit you and then it will do your acting for you.

I can't quite bring myself to award the film a 5 star 'loved it'. I didn't 'love it': I found it deeply unsettling - and that's good. But I'd give it 5 stars for what I might rather nebulously call greatness. And I'm still challenged by exactly what I feel about Tracy's final words to Janner when the trial is over. Will you be as well?