Stanley Kramer (1961)

The main theme from Murder on the Orient Express (1974) was playing in NFT1 before the start of Judgment at Nuremberg.  Richard Rodney Bennett’s enjoyably breezy score seemed an odd choice of musical curtain-raiser but the two films do have something in common – an all-star cast.  That’s one of several major problems with Stanley Kramer’s heavyweight drama.  Four German judges who served the state during the Nazi regime stand accused of crimes against humanity; the trio of American judges presiding at the trial is headed by Spencer Tracy.  Ernest Laszlo’s camera moves across the dock to reveal the four defendants and comes to rest on an aged-up Burt Lancaster, who’s obviously the important one.  His fellow defendants, not played by such big names, are ardent Nazis or craven wrecks but Lancaster’s Ernst Janning is morally sophisticated, an internationally admired jurist and legal scholar who emerges as a tragic figure.  Away from the courtroom, Tracy’s Judge Haywood makes the acquaintance of Marlene Dietrich, as the aristocratic widow of a German general executed by the Allies.  Guest stars take their turn in the witness box:  the representative victims of the Hitler regime’s policy of enforced sterilisation and outlawing of Aryan-Jewish miscegenation are Montgomery Clift and Judy Garland respectively.  The fine acting of both, and of Tracy and Dietrich, is beside the point.  These performers are loaded screen presences; their appearances in Judgment at Nuremberg are uncomfortable to varying degrees but there’s a unifying objection to the stellar casting.  The VIPs are in the film to advertise Kramer’s serious intentions.  It’s as if he thinks his subject, in order to pass muster, needs the help of Hollywood gravitas.

A sequence about halfway through might seem, on the face of it, to repent this wrong-headed approach to the material.  The sequence comprises actual footage shot in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp; although it forms part of the evidence, it instantly obliterates the courtroom histrionics.  (Its immediate impact echoes the explosion, concluding the film’s opening titles, that demolishes a concrete swastika above the Nuremberg stadium.)  Yet the shocking interruption to normal service is itself offensive, and doubly so.  First, it seems strategically placed to reassure the viewer that Kramer – who has been exploring the question of whether the judges on trial were professionally obliged to uphold the law of the land, regardless of what they thought of it; and probing whether Clift’s Rudolf Petersen was sterilised because of his Communist family connections and/or because he was deemed mentally defective – hasn’t lost sight of what Nazi crimes against humanity ultimately entailed.  Second, the footage is shown to the court during the testimony of Colonel Tad Lawson (Richard Widmark).  Up to this point, Lawson has been the fire-breathing chief prosecutor but his sidekick (Joseph Bernard) now asks, and instantly receives from Haywood, permission for his senior temporarily to turn witness for the prosecution – because of Lawson’s personal experience as a soldier who witnessed Bergen-Belsen at first hand, when the camp was liberated in 1945.  Couldn’t the American military come up with anyone else who fitted the bill?  In other words, the footage is useful as a means of giving context to an otherwise narrowly drawn character.

At first, Kramer looks to intend a reasonably authentic treatment of courtroom procedure.  There are interpreters on hand, headphones through which the judges and others receive translations into English or German.  This time-consuming realism is soon rationalised into counsel’s just occasionally advising witnesses to put on or remove headphones, an economical reminder of the bilingual proceedings.  It’s harder to accept what happens to counsel’s objections, which come thick and fast for a while, with the decisions to sustain or overrule reflecting Haywood’s continuing struggle to maintain reasonable impartiality.  Once the narrative moves into melodramatic overdrive, though, objections are conspicuous by their absence.  Haywood adjourns for the day immediately after the Bergen-Belsen film is shown to the court.  The following morning, defence counsel Hans Rolfe (Maximilian Schell) protests that showing this footage to the court was monstrously tendentious and unfair – so why didn’t he object when it began to play?   It’s not long before the viewer realises any objections are now futile for the simple reason that the film has become wedded to lengthy, unstoppable speech-making – from Lawson, from Rolfe and from Janning, who eventually feels compelled to tell the court he is guilty as charged.  The realness of the trial is undermined too by the courtroom camerawork, which is decidedly and distractingly zoom-prone.

Abby Mann’s screenplay is adapted from his television play of the same name.  The original Judgment at Nuremberg was broadcast in April 1959, as part of the famous CBS series Playhouse 90 – as the name suggests, these dramas ran to a standard length of one and a half hours (presumably including commercials).  Kramer’s big-screen version lasts more than three hours.  According to Wikipedia, the TV play included discussions in the judges’ chamber and post-trial exchanges but the trial accounted for most of the ninety minutes.  The film is inflated to include Haywood’s uneasy friendship with Frau Bertholt (Dietrich), who once owned the house now being used as the chief judge’s residence throughout his time in Nuremberg; his interactions with the married German couple (Ben Wright and Virginia Christine) who still look after the place; Lawson’s visit to Berlin to persuade Irene Hoffman (Garland) to give testimony; and sundry other diversions.  A few minutes devoted to Haywood buying a hot dog from a street stall and exchanging looks with a woman who smiles, says, ‘Goodbye, grandpa’ (in German) and goes on her way, is agreeably played by Spencer Tracy but what does it count for?  By the closing stages of the film, it’s all too easy to believe that the trial has gone on for eight months.  It’s a relief when Janning, invited to make a final statement to the court, has nothing further to add; when Haywood, after delivering the verdict, tries and fails to talk on the phone with Frau Bertholt, who is too deep in gloom to answer his call.

The Nuremberg war trials began in December 1946 and ended in April 1949.  The Judges’ Trial, with a total of sixteen defendants, took place through most of 1947.  Kramer’s fictionalised film is set a year later, to allow Abby Mann to make use of major events of 1948 to intensify the moral and political arguments that propel Judgment at Nuremberg.  A social gathering at an American military club is interrupted by news of the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia.  When the judges retire to consider their verdict, the Berlin Airlift is underway.  In the prison where the men on trial are held, the noxious Emil Hahn (Werner Klemperer) gleefully asserts that the Soviet-backed coup in Czechoslovakia vindicates Hitler.  American military top brass in the person of General Merrin (Alan Baxter) urges clemency for the defendants:  the Berlin Blockade and the US-British response are a reminder that in the post-war geopolitical order the West will depend on German goodwill to counter the Russian threat; tough penalties for Janning et al won’t help American-German relations.  The life sentences for all four men eventually handed down are a majority decision, supported by Haywood and one his colleagues (Kenneth MacKenna).  The third judge (Ray Teal) announces his dissent in open court.

Although it includes a load of passionate invective, Mann’s script is baldly dialectical and schematic.  Most of the speakers represent a particular point of view that’s the sum total of their character.  Merrin is the voice of nervous political pragmatism.  Alongside Janning in the dock are (a) the unreconstructed Nazi, (b) the I-was-only-obeying-orders type (Martin Brandt), (c) the quivering coward (Torben Meyer).  Even a supposedly major character like Hans Rolfe amounts to little more than a dual devil’s advocate:  as well as acting on behalf of villains, Rolfe warns the presiding American jurists not to be holier-than-thou:  he quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr’s views on eugenics, invokes Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and so on.  If Haywood, Janning and Frau Bertholt come across as complex personalities it’s only in comparison to these single-issue dramatis personae.  The lone rounded character among the smaller roles is Captain Byers (William Shatner, before he was Captain Kirk), the US army officer assigned to duties as Haywood’s factotum, and who has a German girlfriend (Jana Taylor).  I never expected to return to Judgment at Nuremberg decades on (I think I saw it when I was in my twenties) and feel that William Shatner, deftly humorous and likeable as Byers, gives the most underrated performance in it.

Among the main players, Maximilian Schell was the only member of the television cast to graduate to Kramer’s film.  (A few people in supporting parts, including Werner Klemperer and Torben Meyer, also appeared in both versions.)  Schell is dynamic and accomplished but this is theatrical acting to a greater extent than is justified by the idea of a trial as ‘theatre’.  This didn’t stop him winning the Academy Award for Best Actor, for which Spencer Tracy was also nominated.  Casting him as shrewd, decent, down-to-earth Judge Haywood, a man nearing the end of an honourable rather than a high-flying legal career, exploits Tracy’s screen persona of folksy but quietly formidable American everyman, and Kramer comes close to milking this dry.  Too much screen time is spent showing unassuming Haywood, in and out of the courtroom, wrestling with the weighty moral issues the trial poses.  But Tracy’s exemplary naturalism is in welcome contrast to the prevailing pyrotechnics.  Richard Widmark is monotonously strident as Lawson.  Burt Lancaster, habitually more impressive in the way he looks than in the way he speaks, is here too conscious of his role’s importance even when Janning is silent.  The lengthy monologue in which he admits his guilt is excruciating.

Frau Bertholt serves primarily as a mouthpiece of the German we-didn’t-know-what-the-Nazis-were-doing brigade but Marlene Dietrich has some striking moments, as when she explains to Haywood the poignancy of the German words to ‘Lili Marleen’ that’s lost in the English translation, or how her late husband once called out Hitler for publicly flirting with her.  Montgomery Clift is mesmerising throughout his few minutes on screen and Judy Garland unusually controlled and effective, but they’re both uncomfortable to watch, in the wrong way.  It’s hard not to be conscious of Clift’s and Garland’s own personal difficulties, not to see them as victims of Hollywood and, to that extent, too well cast.  It’s harder still to ignore the grotesque mismatch between their kind of suffering and the victimhood of those on the receiving end of the Nazis.

Even when the trial is over, the pontificating doesn’t stop.  As Haywood prepares to take his leave of Nuremberg, he receives a visit from Rolfe with a message from Janning, who has asked to see the judge.  After pointing out that another recent trial has resulted in much lighter sentences for the Nazi defendants, Rolfe offers Haywood a ‘gentleman’s wager’ that ‘In five years, the men you sentenced to life imprisonment will be free’.  Haywood pays tribute to Rolfe’s gifts as a courtroom logician:

‘So what you suggest may very well happen.  It is logical, in view of the times in which we live.  But to be logical is not to be right.  And nothing on God’s earth could ever make it right.’

Rolfe’s face falls …

In his prison cell, Janning asks Haywood to believe that ‘Those people – those millions of people:  I never knew it would come to that’.  ‘Herr Janning,’ replies Haywood, ‘it came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death’.  Those are the closing lines but not quite the last words.  As Haywood walks out of the jail, text on the screen reports that, of the ninety-nine defendants sentenced to prison terms in the 1946-49 Nuremberg trials, none was still behind bars by the time Judgment at Nuremberg was made.  So Rolfe was right, and so was Haywood.  Most of all – as this film tells us ad nauseam – so are Stanley Kramer and Abby Mann.

19 June 2022