Sight&Sound - 04.2020

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April 2020 | Sight&Sound | 85

JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG
Stanley Kramer; US 1961; BFI; Region B Blu-ray and Region 2
DVD; Certificate 15; 179 minutes; 1.66:1. Extras: commentary
by Jim Hemphill; interview with Maximilian Schell (audio
only); interview with Abby Mann; interview with Abby Mann
and Maximilian Schell; tribute to Stanley Kramer; four
documentary shorts; featurette; trailer; stills gallery; booklet.
Reviewed by Philip Kemp
As a director, Stanley Kramer was by no means
universally admired. He was often labelled
heavy-handed and preachy, and the critic David
Thomson notoriously wrote him off as “a hollow,
pretentious man, too dull for art, too cautious
for politics”. Judgment at Nuremberg, Thomson
added, was “deeply depressing”. Rewatching
Judgment almost 60 years after its release, it’s
hard to concur. Following closely on from Inherit
the Wind (1960), it confirms Kramer’s skill at
keeping a courtroom drama visually fluent
and involving, avoiding any risk of stasis. And
thanks to Abby Mann’s scrupulously subtle,
morally shaded script, the three-hour running
time never drags. Earnest, yes; dull, no.
The action is set in 1948 – one year later than
the trial of Nazi jurists on which it is based in fact
took place, but significantly allowing it to coincide
with the Berlin Airlift and the Soviet takeover of
Czechoslovakia. The big-league trial of the major
party leaders – Goering, Hess, Speer, Streicher – is
long past, and public interest has waned, making
it plausible that an obscure figure like Judge Dan
Haywood (Spencer Tracy), self-described as “a hick
from the backwoods of Maine”, is appointed to
preside over this trial of judges and prosecutors.
Judgment started out in 1959 as an episode,
scripted by Mann, of CBS’s prestige Playhouse 90
series. Of the TV cast only Maximilian Schell,
as defence attorney Hans Rolfe, and Werner
Klemperer (son of the great German-Jewish
conductor Otto Klemperer, and famous for
Hogan’s Heroes) as the most defiantly obdurate
of the accused judges, reprised their roles in the
film version. Kramer had wanted to cast largely
unknowns, but was vetoed by United Artists
who insisted on prestige box-office names.
This was no bad thing, as it turned out. From
Tracy’s self-deprecating Haywood, doggedly
striving to understand how one of Europe’s
most cultured nations could have succumbed to
such vicious savagery, the whole cast – Marlene
Dietrich, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Schell,
Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift and yes, even
William Shatner – rise to the challenge of the
probing, intelligent script and the questions it
raises. Lancaster, as the judge who was once the
most respected among the accused, preserves a
stubborn silence until, at the film’s climax, he
erupts in an outburst of guilt and self-loathing.

Garland and Clift’s contributions are

relatively brief but crucial. Garland plays

a Berlin housewife who, as a teenager, was

accused of having sex with an elderly Jewish

friend; she was jailed and he was executed for

this racially proscribed liaison. Clift plays a

mentally challenged baker’s assistant, forcibly

sterilised under the Nazi eugenics policy.

Both actors, in poor health at the time and

nearing the end of their truncated careers

(they were each to make only two more

films, dying in their mid-40s), bring a moving

emotional fragility to their performances.

But the outstanding star of the film is Mann’s

script. (Of Judgment’s 11 Oscar nominations,

Mann and Schell were the sole winners.) Raising

far more questions than it answers, it refuses

to resort to easy black-and-white judgements

about guilt and innocence. Above all, it presents

us with the central dilemma: if the duty of a

judge is to administer the law of his country as

formulated by its government – then if that law

is evil, can he be considered complicit in its evil?

Kramer’s boldest move was to introduce

actuality footage of the concentration camps

• the piled-up skeletal bodies, the shivering,
  anguished survivors – shown to the court by the
  prosecuting attorney (Widmark). The inclusion
  of this footage aroused widespread objections,
  and probably contributed to the film’s box-office
  failure – as did the suggestion, towards the end
  of the trial, that pressure is put on the judges
  to go easy on the defendants, since Germany’s
  support is now considered vital in the face of
  the Soviet threat. Haywood’s verdict, where he
  warns that no nation is immune to the infection
  of rabid nationalism, probably didn’t help
  either. All the more relevant today, of course.
  Unlike some previous releases, the film’s
  presented in its full original ratio of 1.66:1. Of
  the two discs in the set, the movie is on Blu-ray
  while an accompanying DVD houses the bulk
  of the extras. The latter presents a lavishly
  wide-ranging choice of offerings, including a
  detailed contemporary account of the 1948-
  49 Berlin airlift, and a chilling 1937 British
  instructional short, fronted by Julian Huxley,
  showing that dangerous eugenic advocacy was
  by no means confined to Nazi Germany.

Stanley Kramer’s post-war

courtroom drama, once damned

as dull, emerges as a fluent, subtle

examination of Nazi morality

Moment of truth: Judy Garland as witness Irene Hoffmann-Wallner in Judgment at Nuremberg

Richard Widmark, Judy Garland, Howard Caine

Thanks to Abby Mann’s

scrupulously subtle, morally

shaded script, the three-hour

running time never drags

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