Judgment at Nuremberg, 1961- Judge Not Lest Ye Be Judged

I'm not sure what these blog posts should be categorized as. They're not quite a review, not quite a formal critique and sort of a rant. Well, let's not put me in a box, shall we?



Judgment at Nuremberg, 1961, was directed by Stanley Kramer, written by Abby Mann and stars Spencer Tracy and everyone else. I mean that. In short, it is about the perilous intersection of politics and justice. Spencer Tracy plays Dan Haywood, a retired judge from Maine, charged with running the tribunal of a group of Nazi judges, foremost among them, Ernst Janning, played by Burt Lancaster. Judge Haywood arrives in war ravaged Nuremberg ready to give out some American justice, but quickly finds that this is more complicated than it seems. For one, he can't believe that a man as educated and distinguished as Janning could possibly be guilty of these crimes. The prosecutor is Colonel Tad Lawson, played by Richard Widmark, who seems overly zealous in this proceeding, but we'll find out why. The defense attorney is a German lawyer, Hans Rolfe, played by Maximilian Schell, who is determined to preserve the honor of the German people. Also for some reason, there's a young William Shatner, constantly taking me out of the movie. Also complicating Haywood's mission is the increasing importance of keeping the Germans as allies with the Cold War starting up. Though the movie is sort of an amalgamation of history, the themes are all right. At this time, the war crimes tribunals were diminishing in importance as the Cold War escalated.

The courtroom proceedings deal with the Nazi-era actions of the judges: a case where a man was forcibly sterilized, a Jewish man sentenced to death for having improper contact with an Aryan and so on. The question at the heart of it is were the judges most bound to country or justice? Also, to what degree were they aware of Nazi atrocities and therefore culpable for them? The latter question figures throughout the rest of the film for all the German characters. The first victim is Montgomery Clift as Rudolph Peterson, a baker's assistant who was sterilized under the Third Reich's public health laws. Lawson demonstrates the cruelty of the practice and Rolfe is left to do the unpopular, to try and defend the laws by demonstrating that Peterson is in fact mentally handicapped, and therefore the judges were right. Rolfe does this by citing Oliver Wendell Holmes' own defense of similar laws in Virginia. That's right, America gets burned. Seriously, he's not even making that up. Look up the progressive movement, people. There are two juxtaposed points of view: Lawson wants to judge the judges using the standard of justice, Rolfe wants to use the standards of the time. What affects me most in this portion is Peterson himself as he testifies. Throughout his entire ordeal, everyone, even the doctors and nurses who perform the sterilization, tell him they think it's wrong what's been done to him, but they can't do anything about it and they just do what they're told.

In this time, Haywood has also met Mrs. Bertholt, a German general's widow, played by Marlene Dietrich. She insists that no one had any idea what was going on outside of the SS. Not even her husband who was executed for what was going on in what Mrs. Bertholt sees as postwar blood thirst by the victors. Yeah, okay, lady, the Americans are the ones with the blood thirst. Also, Haywood has asked his household staff what they knew about the Holocaust, but of course, he doesn't call it that. He points out that the Nazis had a lot of rallies in Nuremberg. His housekeeper tells him that she and her husband never went. Haywood points out that Dachau is not that far away, what did they know about that? She claims they knew nothing and then asks even if they had known, what were they supposed to do? They were little people. So, you didn't know anything, but if you had known what could you have done? Haywood doesn't quite seem to be buying this, either, but is too polite to say so. Now is as good a time as any to confess my own personal bias: I'm not a big fan of the school of "We didn't know what was going on..." because I've been to a few concentration camps and besides the stench which still existed some sixty years after the fact, none of these places are so far that no one would notice. I'll grant you Treblinka and Sobibor and maybe Auschwitz are that far off, but still, nobody wondered where all the Jews went? As for the school of "I was just following orders..." I'll get to that later.

At the same time we have Mrs. Bertholt and Herr Rolfe trying to convince us that the Germans are a civilized people who got taken for a ride by some sociopaths, Colonel Lawson is committed to proving that they're all guilty because they went along with it. Why is that? Here's one of the biggest reasons that this is a landmark film. Colonel Lawson swears himself in as a witness and shows us the actual newsreel footage of the concentration camps after liberation. He shows us the ovens where bodies were burned, the gas chambers made to look like showers and some of the images were so awful that even I was shocked and I thought I had seen everything. The footage shocks the American judges and the German ones. For the first time, the German judges get some hint of what they've been accused of. One in disbelief asks a fellow Nazi inmate, something to the effect of, "We couldn't have killed that many people, right?" The Nazi answers that it's not really killing that's the trouble, it's disposing of the corpses. The former turns back shocked. On the outside, Mrs. Bertholt asks Judge Haywood about it. She acts like it's some tired anecdote that Lawson tells for the hell of it every chance he gets and for that, I could just sic Ari Ben Canaan on her ass. That would have been a plot twist no one saw coming.

The next big part of the case is when we review the case of a Jewish man, executed for having an indecent relationship with a then sixteen year old Aryan girl, Irene Hoffman, played by Judy Garland. Irene tells us that Feldenstein was friends with her deceased parents, like a father to her and their relationship was taken out of context. Some time passes and Herr Rolfe reopens the whole can of worms to try to prove that Irene and Feldenstein were having an affair. He also asks Irene why she was so irresponsible as to maintain her friendship with Feldenstein when she knew the law. Here's the irony: Irene Hoffman is the person who tries to do the right thing and because of that, she went to a concentration camp for two years. Janning finally feels compelled to speak, to explain what happened, to tell the tribunal that Germany was in a catastrophe and what the judges did, they did for love of country and they never knew it would end up the way it did.

In the meantime, the Berlin Airlift has started and Haywood is getting pressured to give the judges a light sentence. Irony. Haywood finally concludes by delivering a Spencer Tracy-esque monologue at sentencing, explaining that the judges knew what they had done was wrong under German law and international law and he can't let that go. They all get life sentences, to the distress of Mrs. Bertholt who won't answer Haywood's calls. Before he leaves for home, Haywood has a final meeting with Janning, who tries to clear his conscience. Janning begs Haywood to believe him when he says he never knew it would come to that, the millions of deaths. Haywood tells him it came to that the first time he sentenced an innocent man to death. His complicity legitimized the actions of the Reich.

First of all, Schell is so damn good as Rolfe. He won an Academy Award for Best Actor, remarkable considering how much you want to hate him or that could just be me. He is mesmerizing. He defends the wrong and unpopular and turns the tables on the world when he points out how the world praised Hitler, negotiated with Hitler and the Germans should have stopped them? Also, the film poses difficult questions about the reality of world where justice was turned upside down, what could people have done? What were Germans supposed to do? This is revolutionary as this could have so easily followed the path of films before and stuck to more clear cut good guys and bad guys. I think the conclusion the film reaches is that only because nobody did anything or pretended to not know, were the Nazis able to enact their horrible plans and for that, everyone's culpable.

Exodus, 1960: Where Are We Going?

Okay, so obviously, I am not that good at blogging consistently, but that's probably okay because no one seems to read these anyway. Passover and Easter are just finished, Holocaust Remembrance Day is this Sunday and I find that my thoughts turn to the film Exodus. Exodus is not really what we would consider a Holocaust film since we live in the post-Schindler's list era, but I would guess that it is probably one of the first films to deal with the reality of the consequences of the Holocaust. It's an epic by Otto Preminger, scripted by Dalton Trumbo, formerly of the Hollywood Blacklist. It's debatable whether Exodus or Spartacus was his official exit from the blacklist, but we can be sure Trumbo wasn't known for his brevity.It attempts to depict the scope and complications of the founding of the state of Israel and sometimes, it doesn't succeed, but then again, what could?

Exodus is the story of a group of Jewish Holocaust survivors, among them Dov Landau, a survivor of Auschwitz, played by Sal Mineo. Jill Haworth plays Karen Hansen who survived the war in hiding with Danish parents. They and the rest of the group are helped by a native born Palestinian member of the Haganah, Ari Ben Canaan, played by Paul Newman. Yeah, you read that right: Paul Newman plays the Palestinian part and it's not at all like the time he played the Mexican guy in The Outrage. Interesting fact: Ari is the only Israeli protagonist of a major Hollywood movie until Adam Sandler in Don't Mess With The Zohan. I bet the Israelis would probably rather forget about that and just remember Paul Newman. He meets resistance from our token American, Kitty Fremont, played by Eva Marie Saint, but let's not go too far ahead.

Kitty is touring Cyprus because this is what you do when you're an American with no husband and a fabulous wardrobe. A group of Jewish refugees has been diverted there because they can't be allowed into Palestine because that would tick off the Arabs and well, you've seen the news, right? So, Ari swims into town, by the way, anyone who cares: awesome chance to see Paul Newman with no shirt, I'm just pointing it out. Ari is tasked with helping the refugees sail for Palestine with no actual hope that they'll make it, but that they will create an international incident of some sort. Meanwhile, Kitty has met Karen. Kitty felt strangely about the Jews at first, but now wants to adopt Karen who she thinks is almost like an American. Oh, my God. Could you not just slap her now? Just as she gets permission to take Karen to America, Ari absconds with the refugees including Karen in order to take them on a boat and demand that they be allowed to set sail for Palestine, but remember they can't do that because of the Arab resistance to the idea and you've seen the news. While we wait for the British to change their mind, Kitty goes aboard to talk to Karen who has gone all Zionist on her and to argue with Ari about his methods. The film at this point posits an interesting question: In the aftermath of the Holocaust, what is acceptable for Jews to ensure their future? Ari threatens to blow up the ship in order to prove a point, which I don't think makes a lot of sense, but you get the idea. The refugees go on a hunger strike until the British change their mind and they do. So then they go to Palestine and live happily ever after, right? The operative word being Palestine.

When they arrive, Karen goes to Gan Dafna, a youth village. Dov sneaks off to join the Irgun, the more extreme Jewish resistance force. More extreme than having a hunger strike and threatening to blow yourself up? You bet! The head of the Irgun is Akiva Ben Canaan, Ari's uncle. Akiva forces Dov to disclose that he survived Auschwitz by being used for sex by the SS, but this is oddly enough, a tamer version of what the novel said. In the novel, Dov makes it through by being a Sonderkommando, one of the prisoners tasked with making believe for those about to be executed that the gas chamber was just a shower and later disposing of the bodies. That or sex abuse? You try to choose. I think it's interesting that Hollywood 1960 thought people were ready for Nazi molestation, but not the reality of the Sonderkommando. Karen goes to Gan Dafna, greeted by Barak Ben Canaan, Ari's dad and Taha, the Arab chief of the nearby village and a close family friend of the Ben Canaans. So, this country is the size of Rhode Island and everybody knows everybody? Got it.

Back in town, Kitty is trying to help Karen find her father who she thinks came to Palestine, when she runs into Ari at the hotel restaurant. There, sparks fly because well, Ari is Paul Newman. Ari has to leave to go talk to his Uncle Akiva about whether or not they should be blowing stuff up to get rid of the British. Akiva thinks they should be, Ari seems to be leaving his options open. Okay, so the next day Ari and Kitty set out for Gan Dafna, when we make a stop in the scenic Jezreel valley, where Ari is from and also, some stuff happened. Ari tells her that he wants her to understand that he's a Jew and that this is his country. Kitty says that Ari makes her feel like she's a Presbyterian when he can't forget he's a Jew. Wow, lady, wow. Really? They kiss for some reason and then are out of frame, so I can only assume they had sex on the side of the road from my years of watching James Bond movies. Not really safe, I don't think, but then they go and meet his family. Wow, this relationship is moving fast. Then we go to Gan Dafna, where Kitty meets with Karen and learns that the Dafna in Gan Dafna is in fact, Ari's dead girlfriend, who was tortured and murdered by Arabs. Then suddenly Kitty wants to break up with Ari seeing as how they've only been together since that afternoon, because he'll always be a Jew and she'll be Presbyterian and she doesn't think his family likes her? It's all pretty stupid. Let me be clear, Paul Newman, Palestinian freedom fighter or not, is Paul Newman. It would take a little more than a dead girlfriend statue, hostile relatives and Judaism to scare me off. Seriously.

It's intermission! Because this movie is long! We meet back with Ari and Kitty and Karen. No, this isn't awkward at all. They take Karen to see her father who has been traumatized by something and doesn't acknowledge his daughter. As they leave, there's an explosion: the Irgun, including Dov have attacked the British. This leads to Dov and Akiva being captured by the British and subsequently scheduled for execution. Ari has to go bust them out of jail, and Akiva is fatally wounded in the course of their escape. Ari is wounded and taken to Taha's home, where Kitty treats his wounds and apparently gets over their interfaith issues. Seriously, lady... At the same time, the UN is voting on the Palestine issue. The UN votes for a Jewish state, everyone celebrates, but if I have learned anything from history, it's that when the British leave someplace, everything goes to hell. Except in America. I guess we had a Civil War later, so yeah, maybe everything does go to hell when the British leave somewhere. Canada, we're waiting. Taha is getting pressure to attack Gan Dafna with an Arab force that appears to be headed by a Nazi, who looks like he was also in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but I remember that guy disintegrated. Taha warns Ari and Kitty to get out and the movie loses me again when Taha explains that he can't join forces with Ari because he now realizes he's a Muslim. Okay, so you're just going to ditch your buddy in order to align yourself with the guys working with the Nazi from Central Casting who want to go kill all the kids at Gan Dafna? Again, seriously?

Dov has arrived at Gan Dafna where Karen stands guard. He tells her he wants to marry her and they'll have a real life together. Ari and Kitty go to evacuate all the young children from Gan Dafna because now Kitty is all in with Ari, even though he kind of tries to keep her out of it. Yeah, I might draw the line around here, tell Ari I would be at the hotel when this whole war thing ended. Karen is found dead before Ari and the rest of the Haganah go to attack the Arab village. Where Taha is dead, presumably killed by some of his fellow Muslims. They bury Karen and Taha together, to share it in peace and Ari swears quite movingly that someday, the living Jews and Muslims will share the land of Israel in peace. Kitty and Dov go off too, and they all board trucks to go to the next fight.

So, this movie has some flaws, for the most part flaws seen in the novel of the same name by Leon Uris. For one, the view of the Israeli Arab conflict, which modern audiences probably see as simple, not giving enough time to the Arab Palestinian side of the conflict and most of the Arab characters are villains and Taha is sympathetic, but it's not like he's a good guy. It's bizarre that this film got made at all and was probably only made because it was based on a popular book. You might remember this from the first season of Mad Men in the episode called Babylon, the characters talk about the novel and Don Draper tells Rachel Menken that it's going to be a movie starring Paul Newman. "Well, now I have two reasons to see it.", Rachel quips. I'm with you, sister. It is also from a time when there was no real questioning of whether or not Israel had the right to exist and a time where the reality of the Holocaust was somewhat forgotten and not yet again recovered. It attempts to illuminate a conflict that most of us still don't understand and still rages on and one that nobody has attempted to confront, until Don't Mess With The Zohan. Yeah, I think people would probably just as soon forget about that.