Review of Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) by Spencer L — 01 Feb 2009

I saw this the other day and meant to comment on it. Really great movie with a stellar cast - Spencer Tracy, Marlene Dietrich, Burt Lancaster and an amazing job by Maximilian Schell who plays the lawyer defending the Nazi judges (I actually thought Burt Lancaster was amazing too).

..as well as some surprising faces, in that Spencer Tracy's clerk was played by a very young William Shatner in his pre-Star Trek days,,,a William Shatner who amazingly seems to know how to act, which just makes it weirder, In addition to all of the star power, it's just a very well made film with a lot of depth.

It really shows just the tragedy of what Germany inflicted upon itself as well as the world, and how horrible it is when people don't face up to the reality of their own agency in what occurs outside their doors.

You really get the sense that denial was a bit of a national disease in the years immediately following the war - reminded me a bit of that German movie "The Nasty Girl" which deals with the same topic only further in the future, where a school girl who proudly thinks she grew up in a "Nazi resistance" town finds out that history has been rewritten after the events and that it was in fact a heavily pro-Nazi town instead, (and that many of the people she grew up respecting were either complicit or directly involved in perpetuating atrocities of one kind or another).

That mantra of "what could we do?" and "we had no choice" is unhappily still very relevant in the world today, in both big and small ways.