PG | 2 h 59 min | Drama | 1961
Stanley Kramer’s courtroom drama is set in Nuremberg, Germany in 1948. One of America’s several post-World War II trials is underway; together, the tribunals will charge German military officers, Nazi party leaders, doctors, industrialists, and judges for war crimes.
In this trial, Chief Judge Haywood (Spencer Tracy) and fellow judges must decide the fates of the German judges before them. Are they, as men of influence, guilty of sentencing innocents to sterilization or death? Or are they mere patriots compelled to bow to national interest? Regardless, this isn’t a typical trial; the defendants are charged with crimes committed in the name of the law.
In one electrifying opening shot of an exploding swastika, Kramer gets past the backstory. His film isn’t about the war, but about a reckoning: Are implementers of fascist policy as complicit in its evil as its makers?
Kramer provocatively casts screen-hero Burt Lancaster as a German judge, Ernst Janning, and quintessential screen-villain Richard Widmark as an American prosecutor, Col Tad Lawson. Accustomed to Lancaster’s on-screen image of courage and conviction, and Widmark’s of treachery, you begin rooting for Janning and suspecting Lawson’s motives. As the film progresses you begin to wonder.
Kramer’s less interested in historical accuracy than in motives and motivations. He delights in paradoxes as his camera comes from behind and around characters: defendants, witnesses, counsels, judges. You see judges judging, then judges being judged.
Lancaster’s and Tracy’s speeches stand out, but the entire cast is brilliant, including Maximilian Schell, Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, and Marlene Dietrich. They ramp up the dramatic tension with their pauses, frowns, smiles, and stares, and the pitch and tenor of their voices.
Haywood, walking the streets among ordinary Germans, happens by the door of a tram that pedestrians are hurriedly boarding. In the scrum, younger folk, fearing the old man will be left behind, bodily lift him up. Haywood smiles. They clearly mistook him for a passenger. Yet, he hops on, acknowledging that they were just trying to help.
Privately, Haywood figures that people are just people, in some circumstances, blind to notions around nationality, age, race, color, religion. But back in the courtroom watching blood-curdling footage of the Holocaust, he finds that, in other circumstances, even kind people can be cruel beyond belief.
‘Never Forget,’ ‘Never Again’
Many films embody the solemn post-war “Never forget” oath: to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive so future generations remember its horrors. Kramer’s is closer to the equally solemn “Never again” oath. What’s the point of remembrance if we’re condemned to repeat those horrors? To Kramer, the memory of genocide isn’t an end itself no matter how reverential; moral clarity alone can prevent its recurrence.Judge Janning’s diagnosis is eerily accurate, “We had a democracy, yes, but it was torn by elements within. Above all, there was fear: fear of today, fear of tomorrow, fear of our neighbors, and fear of ourselves.”
It’s said that truth is the antidote to fear because truth sets one free. Screenwriter Abby Mann’s message is that democracies that deny or hide truth, nurture fear, and this is the path to fascism. Fascists cultivate “othering” to a point where every “other” automatically becomes the enemy, not because they’ve done anything inimical, but because they’re the “other.” That’s when convenience trounces conviction.
Shot in black and white, Kramer’s film doesn’t shun the gray. He breaks from Hollywood’s characteristically neat dichotomies of good guys versus bad guys. He neither lionizes defenders of democracy nor demonizes its destroyers. Instead, he points to fear disguised as faithfulness, pride disguised as patriotism, and opportunism disguised as obedience.
To Kramer, these instincts of self-preservation are as alive in democracies as they are in dictatorships. Only democracies that stay vigilant against these tendencies avoid the trap of turning totalitarian. To Kramer, these are individual inclinations before they become institutional, a corrupt judiciary starts first with a corrupt judge. It’s what the lone human will tolerate or condemn that decides what society eventually will.
This year marks the 90th anniversary of Hitler’s fateful ascent to power. This film, which won three of its eleven Oscar nominations, shows how uncovering the truth behind such histories, no matter how morbid, is not just desirable, but essential.
The tradition of due process, mocked by totalitarian dispensations, isn’t lip service. When sincere, it can be the difference between democracies and dictatorships and, from time to time, democracies must remind themselves of that.
