Is Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) the most important film ever made?
This movie, directed by Stanley Kramer and written by Abby Mann, uses courtroom drama to do much more than emphasize the cruelty and inhumanity of four judges during the reign of Germany's Third Reich. This motion picture brings forth ideas, ideas which are every bit as challenging this very day as they were when the film first appeared in theaters.
The most crucial of these ideas concerns personal responsibility. You may have heard the famous quote: "First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me." Those words were spoken by Martin Niemöller, a German pastor and anti-communist who had initially supported Hitler and national socialism. Eventually the Nazis did come for him, arresting him for not being enthusiastic enough about the Third Reich.
Personal responsibility. Those are a pair of heavy words. What would we do today if something similar were to happen? Or are questions such as this too negative, threatening as they do to squelch our insular community of enlightened hipsters who are, after all, only trying to make an honest buck to spend at the local concert venue?
The question is important because we can no longer ask it of President Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, the fictional character in the Sinclair Lewis novel It Can't Happen Here. Yet his ilk surrounds us, permeates our culture and dips its oily hands into our collective soup every day. Our response? Well, things are still better here than they are elsewhere, and besides, "Law and Order SVU" comes on in half an hour.
The time has come, my friends, to call us all out. Our lackadaisical fascination with dumb TV, our emotional investment in stupid consumerism, our insistence on evaluating ourselves based on such intangibles as race, color, gender, age, religion--these are the evidence--admissible in the courtroom of the blog--that declare our people guilty of that greatest of all crimes against humanity: a wasted life.
Goddammit, all we have for certain is this festering boil of an existence that we call living. To turn our backs to the evil that never quite goes away is a betrayal of our duty to ourselves. Whenever we smirk at the misfortune of someone weaker than ourselves, we are hoisting coal onto the fire of that evil. We are responsible, goddammit, and to deny that is to deny the essence of that one thing that makes us human beings in the first place, that one thing understood and expressed so well by the poet John Donne, when he wrote:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
This is not a matter of personal choice. This is an obligation to the truth, one which only a fool can reject, and at his own peril, as well as at the peril of us all.
The Nazis rejected this obligation and that is part of what pitted them against the natural way of things, a way which they claimed they embraced, but only after they sought to pervert it in every way imaginable.
The United States held twelve trials in Nuremberg after World War II. The defendants in the trials were sixteen judges and lawyers. One of these men committed suicide rather than face his accusers. Another was freed as the result of a mistrial. Of the remaining fourteen, ten were found guilty and four were exonerated.
The cast of actors in the film based on one of those trials is a list of some of the greatest visual artists in the history of the medium, including Spencer Tracy as the chief judge, Burt Lancaster as an initially un-recalcitrant Nazi, Richard Widmark as the military prosecutor, Marlene Dietrich as the widow of the man whose home the judge has been assigned to reside in, Judy Garland as a reluctant and occasionally hateful witness, and Montgomery Clift as Rudolph Peterson, a victim of Nazi sterilization in a performance on which anyone would be proud to hang a career. Perhaps best of all, we get Maximilian Schell as the embodiment of blind servitude and brutal beauty in the role of the evil defense attorney.
Judgment at Nuremberg was not, as is commonly opined, the first U.S. film with the Holocaust as its subject matter. For that you would have to go back to 1946 and check out Orson Welles' movie The Stranger. You probably should check it out. Then in 1948 Montgomery Clift starred in the very fine Holocaust film, The Search. There was even an idiotic musical made about the Holocaust in 1956 called Singing in the Dark--and this film was so bad that it's no wonder you've not heard of it. Three years later we were all gathered to weep over The Diary of Anne Frank--and weep we did. But of these films, only the one directed by Welles had a smidgen of an idea attached to it and this is where Kramer's brilliance lifts it head in pride.
Were the four judges in this--the third trial--culpable? Or were they merely saving themselves from persecution as did so many others who were never tried? Were they maintaining an adherence to actual laws on the books and hence remaining loyal to the fatherland? Or were they cowards and traitors to the people of their country for refusing to say NO? Did not the finest legal minds in the history of the great United States--such as Oliver Wendell Holmes (who is quoted liberally)--likewise endorse and even advocate the use of eugenics and sterilization as a hedge against the encroachment of undesirables? These are more than mere questions. Whenever someone today asks if the policy of detaining accused at Guantanamo is righteous or vile, that is more than a question. Whenever we ponder why the particular "they" of the moment hate us and yearn for our destruction, that is more than curiosity. Whenever a child asks his parents why they refer to a man as a nigger behind his back and call him Fred to his face, that is more than insipidity or naivete. These are all ideas and today, just as in 1961, just as in 1933-1945, ideas can get you killed. In that context, Judgment at Nuremberg earns its longevity as one of the greatest American films because it is so bloody dangerous. And that is a very good thing in these tired and stupid times in which we live.
So, is it the most important film ever made? Only a willful ignorance of those times and these can hold out against such a judgment for long.
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