Judgment at Nuremberg, a three-hour film produced and directed by Stanley Kramer and written by Abby Mann, opened last month and has already provoked more heated discussion than any American movie within memory. Since the film makes a very ambitious attempt to deal with questions that are of particular interest to readers of COMMENTARY, we thought it appropriate to take the unusual step of presenting two differing responses.
Harris Dienstfrey, an associate editor of COMMENTARY, writes frequently on the movies; his last contribution to these pages was an article on Ingmar Bergman (November 1961). Jason Epstein, who participated in our symposium “Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals” last April, is a vice-president of Random House and editor-in-chief of the Modern Library.
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Harris Dienstfrey:
The message picture stands somewhere between the art film and the commercial movie. While the art film emphasizes texture and offers ultimates, and the commercial movie emphasizes plot and offers entertainment, the message picture chooses to emphasize a single problem, and it offers for exposure one tension-filled area of contemporary society. Most movies escape any such easy classification, of course. The neo-realistic films from Italy—such as Vittorio de Sica’s The Bicycle Thief and Umberto D—often aim for ultimate values as well as contemporary problems (as a result, they sometimes confuse social conditions with the condition of man); and many French comedies—such as Jean Renoir’s Can-Can and Picnic on the Grass—present a surface of “simple” entertainment but are eminently serious beneath. As for American films, they usually make few bones about the entertainment they mean to offer, but it is also true that the best of them—those, for example, which Manny Farber calls “underground films”—contain an extraordinary amount of accurately observed contemporary life, sometimes much more than the presumably realer message pictures. In any case, attempts to make the latter have been few and far between in the United States. As a bit of Hollywood folklore goes: “If you want a message, send for Western Union.”
To this, a major exception in Hollywood has been Stanley Kramer, an independent picture maker who now both directs and produces his own movies. He has probed such themes as race relations (The Defiant Ones), free speech (Inherit the Wind) , and nuclear warfare (On the Beach.) Cinematically, Kramer has never been a particularly striking, interesting, or even adroit director. For better or worse the success of his films has depended on the intelligence with which they developed their themes.
The results vary. In The Defiant Ones, where Kramer was aided considerably by Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis—as two convicts, Southern Negro and poor white, thrown together during a prison break—he made one of the few movies that suggests how America looks from its social and economic basements and how a man’s spirit might be damaged by the sight. But in Inherit the Wind, where he retold the Scopes “monkey” trial, Kramer crudely reduced all of its complexities to the lone issue of free speech. The reactions of a small rural community to the usurpation by science of provinces which the town had always assumed were God’s, became, in Kramer’s hands, the manifestations of undemocratic thought-control (if not something worse). The film further undercut its possible meaningfulness by portraying the man who represented Bryant as a rube and a humorless slob—no other word will do—and the man who represented Darrow as an urbane wit and meticulous eater who never belched.
The theme of Kramer’s newest movie dwarfs any he has attempted so far. Ambitious, three hours long, Judgment at Nuremberg depicts a more or less fictional trial in 1948 of four German judges who had sentenced large numbers of men during the Nazi regime to concentration camps. Its theme is the moral responsibility of individuals who act with public sanction in public capacities. Given these obviously high intentions and the film’s conceivable achievement, one can only be particularly disappointed at the failure of Judgment at Nuremberg; for it is a bad movie in almost every respect.
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Details of the plot are fairly complex. The men on trial range from one who remains a thoroughly committed Nazi—“Today you judge me, tomorrow the Bolsheviks judge you!”—to a man, called Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster), who helped establish the Weimar Republic, was considered one of the legal world’s great jurists and thinkers, but who nevertheless headed the Nazi Ministry of Justice. The trial quickly centers on resolving the question of Janning’s guilt. Though he refuses at first to enter a plea—his three compatriots plead not-guilty—his young attorney (Maximilian Schell) passionately believes that Janning must be saved so as to help lead the new Germany. The jurist’s perplexing history pushes the American judge (Spencer Tracy) to go beyond his usual task of weighing the evidence; he also hopes to understand the reasons for Janning’s behavior.
Toward the end of the trial, the Russians blockade Berlin, and by so doing make clear to the West the important part Germany will have to play in defending Europe. As a result, both the U.S. army prosecutor (Richard Widmark) and the American judge are told to “go easy.” A nation seeing its former judges given harsh prison terms might not be eager to assist the political bloc which passed the sentences. Because of this extralegal pressure, the trial of the four Nazi judges becomes a sort of parallel to the trials they themselves conducted. Beginning as an examination of individual responsibility, the present trial ultimately becomes a test of such responsibility. Yet, pressure or no, the American judge finds the four guilty. Despite the compassion evoked by Janning’s terribly misguided motives, his actions were no different from those of his colleagues, and his guilt is no different either. The sentence for all is life imprisonment.
It is probably clear—even from this skeletal plot summary—that the several merits Judgment at Nuremberg does have are not always small. The film has an immediacy, for example, that is not simply the result of the current Berlin crisis or of ordinary “courtroom suspense”—although indeed, the screenplay (by Abby Mann) has moments of power, the photography (by Ernest Laszlo) sometimes establishes a documentary newsreel effect, and several of the performances (notably Maximilian Schell’s and Montgomery Clift’s, as a man sterilized by the Nazis) amount to acting of sustained complexity and intelligence. Mainly, though, the immediacy of Judgment at Nuremberg derives from the film’s multiple purpose, a major part of which is the attempt to examine boldly the horror of the Nazi concentration camps—film clips screened during the trial show lamps made of human skin and emaciated bodies being piled into wide, deep ditches after the liberation. The film also seeks to understand the internal public support given the government that built and maintained these camps, and to assign guilt for the monstrous evil they represented (the defense attorney asks: but did not Churchill praise Hitler “in 1938?”). More, the movie wants to confront, via the blockade, the dilemmas of international politics, and to portray, through the attitudes of Janning (the “old” Germany) and his attorney (the “new” one), thirty years of a nation’s history.
Judgment at Nuremberg even attempts, rather anxiously, to provide object lessons for American political and institutional life. When one witness explains that the Nazis hanged children, the camera suddenly cuts to an American soldier standing on guard, a Negro. And when witnesses discuss the subservience of the German courts to politics and the transformation of trials into public circuses, the dialogue contains tones that clearly hint at McCarthyism, witch-hunts, and American Congressional investigating committees. Finally, when the defense attorney questions the U.S.’s right to condemn the German judges, he does so in part by raising the specter of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There is a kind of bravery in urging these connections and in the film’s whole intent to come to grips with “real” and “political” events. Perhaps it is most brave in its determination to take an absolutely clear stand concerning the guilt of the men on trial. Certainly the film’s strongest virtue is its insistence on leaving no doubt about its judgment—on facing not simply the logic of its dramatic form but the ultimate demand of its subject matter.
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And yet Judgment at Nuremberg is confused, poorly made, and, worse, even disingenuous. The central problem it chooses to raise is a moral-philosophical one: the conflict between an individual’s responsibility and his public duties, between commitment to the principles of justice and commitment to the cause of national survival. But the picture almost immediately devolves upon establishing a considerably narrower issue: the trial of the German judges is conducted to prove that they passed sentences regardless of the evidence put before them. Thus, they violated a law, according to the film, which is basic to every civilized nation in the world. But the determination of so specifically judicial an abuse has only the vaguest connection with the larger problem of individual responsibility in conflict with public needs. What relevance has this problem in relation to four men who have committed easily indentifiable, commonly accepted criminal acts? More, the nature of the crime for which the film finds them guilty says nothing at all about either the causes or the development or the consequences of the Nazi period. There is a wide distance between a corrupt judiciary and the concentration camps. Yet at its end the film acts as if it has satisfactorily fixed all its giant questions, not only the moral but the social and historical questions as well.
Judgment at Nuremberg tries to make many of its points through implicit parallels. But the situations it compares are usually so dissimilar that the ostensible parallel only creates additional irresolutions. The movie never recognizes the difference between the pressure under which the German judges passed sentences and the pressure under which the American judge must pass sentence at Nuremberg: the former were asked to condemn innocent men; the latter is asked to free guilty ones. Nor does the film suggest the quite different consequences in these two cases of standing against the ruling powers.
Most of the other parallels are simply ambiguous: the implied references to McCarthyism, the single abrupt image of an impassive Negro soldier, and so forth. Are such references meant to juxtapose comparable outrages (legally comparable or morally or both?), or are they meant to denote two stages, the incipient and the full-blown, in the evolution of an evil? If the film knows, or understands that its juxtapositions are at all unclear, it does not say.
One scene in particular reveals how Judgment at Nuremberg refuses to admit the possibility of having raised an unsolved and perhaps insoluble question. The background is this: Before the war, an orphaned sixteen-year-old German girl had been looked after by a long-time friend of her family, a sixty-year-old Jewish man. On the basis of a law which made intercourse between an “Aryan” and a “non-Aryan” illegal, the man was brought to trial and, despite the girl’s (and his) total denial, was found guilty. Two of the Nazi judges on trial at Nuremberg had sentenced him, and the army prosecutor has sought out the now grown woman (Judy Garland) to insist that she testify against them.
From the opening of this scene—the very way in which the woman stands hidden in the shadows, in tragic profile, allowing her husband to do much of the arguing at first—one knows the result, that she will come into the “light” to testify. The woman herself explains that testifying will mean the renewed hatred of her neighbors, the destruction of the store she and her husband have just bought, and a public agony she has lain awake every night fearing. But the prosecutor tells her—and the film clearly agrees—that testifying is her duty, “to one person at least.” Her opposition collapses immediately. The possibility that the woman might have an equally high duty to herself and to her marriage is, in this one phrase, completely dismissed. At best, the prosecutor’s pronouncement is an individual assessment among equally valid moral claims; like all such assessments, it can never be certain. But the film treats the pronouncement as if it were revealed law, beyond dispute. (The question of whether or not the woman’s testimony is necessary for the conviction of the four judges is silently by-passed.) The self-satisfied, almost pompous tone of this particular scene and its lack of moral tension, is characteristic of the way the film confronts the most difficult moral problems and pretends to meet them head on.
As might be supposed from all this, Judgment at Nuremberg also uses a stock heavy-handedness to establish its characters. In the opening five minutes, the American judge, who is, after all, the moral agent of the film, (1) remarks that the house procured for him by the army is much too large for a single man such as himself, (2) complains that for the same reason he does not need two servants, (3) tells an army aide to relax and not call him “sir”—“Call me Judge or Dan or something,” (4) explains that he understands full well that he is the tenth or so judge considered for the job, and (5) tries to prevent his maid from carrying upstairs one of his suitcases—apparently the heaviest of the three he has brought. The sequence leaves one with no doubts about the judge: he is an American, a democrat, and a good man. (He comes from Maine too.)
Many of the secondary characters are presented, no less obviously, mainly by their physical appearance. The three German judges who quickly get relegated to second place at the trial say very little in the course of the film. But if they said nothing, one would still know them to be guilty; they carry the mark of Cain on their faces—unlike a man like Adolf Eichmann. The fanatic Nazi watches the proceedings with a continuous sneer, his full lower lip drooping slightly—so full that it immediately signifies decadence. A second judge, a bungling opportunist, sports jowls that one understands are as limp and as flabby as his soul. Who would not convict these men? They are, respectively, the archetypal Sadist and Coward fashioned by Hollywood over a span of forty years. (Lancaster and Clift do manage to use their appearance to good advantage: the former’s large, big-boned head sits heavily and ill at ease on a somehow shrunken body, and Clift’s face, as if designed by an artist verging on cubism, is both a sign and a cross.)
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Judgment at nuremberg manipulates various technical devices to help put on its false front. There is the business of moving from one scene to the next by repeating a word or action. Repetitions usually imply that an attitude or a prophecy—that something—is being confirmed or ironically undercut; they suggest a connection and a density of thought. But the connections here are meaningless. When Janning decides to confess his guilt, he tells his attorney: “Nothing you can say will change my mind. Nothing.” The next scene, cut directly, as it were, into this remark, starts with a news commentator saying: “Nothing has changed yet in the Berlin situation. . . .” Again, in another scene, the American judge and the embittered wife (Marlene Dietrich) of a German general, who had been executed by a previous American court, drink coffee together while discussing the puzzles and complexities of Hitler’s Germany. The wife says that the judge must believe that she and her husband knew nothing about the concentration camps, the judge in turn explains that he does not know what to believe, and the camera closes in on coffee being poured into his demitasse. There is an abrupt cut to a shot of coffee being poured into a paper cup. The camera pulls back, and it is the next morning in the office of the prosecutor. It is clear that neither of these repetitions carries any significance at all, but function only to create a false resonance.
The existence of several minor characters produces the same kind of “resonance.” A German chauffeur, the prosecutor’s assistant, a German prostitute—to mention only three—immediately trigger by their presence as well as by their appearance very familiar expectations: perhaps a violent anti-American speech from the chauffeur, or an explanation from the assistant about his boss’s obsessive concern with punishing the Nazis, or a cynical speech from the prostitute to the effect that American and German soldiers are equally swinish. But the characters fail even to fulfill these clichés. In fact they do nothing at all in the film but contribute their physical presence. These people inflate the movie with dramatic foreshadowing and then, before one recognizes that they have been misleading gestures rather than true accomplishments, they are swallowed by the plot—like the deceptive transitions.
Much too much in Judgment at Nuremberg of every sort of thing is only gesture. The film has attempted a good deal that is foreign to many American films; its complex intentions and its degree of courage together create a compelling surface. But these virtues do not go very deep. Almost everywhere beneath the surface, Judgment at Nuremberg gives way to falsifying techniques, comforting characterizations, and to moral and intellectual disorder.
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II
Jason Epstein:
Judgment at Nuremberg is an astonishingly intelligent film which succeeds in raising, despite the occasional fumbling of its director, Stanley Kramer, some of the darkest questions of this dark age. For while the production is mounted on such a pretentious scale as occasionally to blur the point the film is trying to make, it is clear from reading the script that Abby Mann, who wrote it, is strenuously addressing himself to the idea that not Germany itself but our civilization as a whole was represented by the Nazi episode, and that the cold war is a further, more virulent, symptom of the same disorder. Now this is a provocative point, not often made by even our most astute and responsible observers, and it is all the more remarkable, even to some extent bizarre, that it should come to us in the oversimplified images of a pompously directed moving picture, that Spencer Tracy and Judy Garland—those Virgils of our childhood—should rise again to show us the way.
The film takes place as the trials are petering out. Goering is dead, the generals have been sentenced. The world has lost interest. It is the time of the Berlin Airlift, and the cold war has begun. The Americans who are running the trials are beginning to wonder whether it wouldn’t be a good idea to forget about the Nazis in view of the more important business at hand.
The particular trial with which Judgment at Nuremberg deals is one of the so-called second series, involving lawyers, industrialists, financiers, diplomats, and businessmen of the Third Reich, and the American judge (Spencer Tracy) who has come all the way from Maine to hear the case is genuinely curious to know what this second level of Nazidom was like and how the four lawyers in the dock could possibly have served under Hitler. In the preface to the published version of the screenplay, Mann writes that he chose this series of trials because they seemed to him the “most significant.” “The Goerings, the Streichers, the Himmlers, the Eichmanns,” he says, “would inevitably end in a study in Psychopathic Sexualis. But the second group—these men who had been the bulwark of the most enlightened culture of Europe—how could they have gone along? And if they had, what was their responsibility? Finally a glimmering of understanding that the very philosophy that enabled the Nazis to come to power was not unrelated to the motive in their being released set the groundwork for my premise.”
As the film ends, the following notice appears upon the screen: “On 14 July, 1949 judgment was rendered in the last of the second Nuremberg trials. Of ninety-nine sentenced to prison terms, not one is still serving his sentence.” This “bulwark of the most enlightened culture of Europe,” then, is once again at large and, we are free to assume, up to its old tricks—this time arm in arm with ourselves. The point that Mann is making here is not so much that the men convicted at Nuremberg were Nazis who should have been severely punished and instead succeeded in getting off lightly, but that they represent a continuous and apparently indispensable filament in the modern world—these Germans who made it possible for Hitler to fight his war and who, we feel, are necessary to help us fight ours.
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Of the four Nazi judges on trial three are typical of the sort of flotsam that rises to the surface everywhere, time-servers and opportunists who, though they are played by German character actors and are meant to be specifically German types, are really universal specimens The courtrooms of the world, one is made to feel, are full of such shifty characters. The fourth, Ernst Janning (played by Burt Lancaster), is also a common type, but of a superior order. Earlier in his career he had helped draft the Weimar constitution and stood for the highest ideals of German civility. Having committed himself to humanitarian and patriotic causes before Hitler, he agreed to serve under the dictator as a sort of Minister of Justice, for the sake of his country and hopefully to restrain the Nazis should they get out of hand. Like the lesser defendants, however, he ended by railroading numbers of innocent victims, two of whom appear at the trial to testify against him.
The trial, we are told, lasts eight months (the film lasts three hours), and we are, of course, given only brief glimpses of it—the American prosecutor establishing that the defendants had been running kangaroo courts and the German lawyer for the defense insisting that they were only doing their duty and that their victims were guilty in any case. But for all the debating points that are exchanged, there is little doubt from the very beginning as to how the trial will come out, and it requires an effort to go along with the pretense that Spencer Tracy, despite his anguished wrinkles, is really keeping an open mind. Indeed, the legal business is so lightly sketched in that we are never quite sure what exactly the defendants are being charged with. In short, it is obvious that Mann is not chiefly interested in this aspect of the trial at all. As a reading of the script makes clear, there is something else on his mind that Kramer seems not to have projected as clearly as he might but which is meant to be the main source of the film’s suspense—not whether the Germans will turn out to have been guilty, but whether the Americans will submit to the increasing pressures to drop the charges (“the very philosophy that enabled the Nazis to come to power was not unrelated to the motive in their being released”).
Now Mann puts this premise, as he should, in the most tentative and qualified terms; and it would therefore be an injustice to give the impression that he is trying to draw anything like a simple parallel between the Nazis on the one hand and the German-American alliance in the cold war on the other. In fact he is not suggesting a parallel at all, but a continuum. That is, he sees the history of the past thirty years as a single unit held together by the presence of a tendency in the modern world toward mass violence, particularly when national interests are threatened. Perhaps he means to suggest even that these national interests are hardly more than pretexts to justify the violence that we in our civilization can no longer suppress.
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From the very start of the film, there are pressures on Spencer Tracy to take a moderate view of the defendants. One of his fellow judges, who had served in the first series of trials and has acquired a practical attitude toward the proceedings, sees no reason to deal harshly with these relatively solid citizens. His adjutant, who has a German girl friend, is eager to get along in Germany. Marlene Dietrich, who nearly manages to seduce him, thinks it would be brutal to blame these defendants for what the Nazis did. But the climactic pressure is the Berlin Airlift which occurs toward the end of the trials and which persuades the American prosecutor himself, who up to now had pressed his case with the cold passion of Perry Mason, to ask that the charges be mitigated (a point which is made with unmistakable clarity in the screenplay, but which Kramer thoroughly obscures in the film). Yet the judge does not yield, either to Marlene Dietrich’s blandishments or to the requirements of the cold war.
What mainly convinces him to hold his ground is a prosecutor’s argument of such dubious legal relevance that its presence in the film can only be accounted for by Mann’s essential indifference to legal questions and his primary concern with the other, deeper questions alluded to above. Halfway through the film, long before he decides to relent, the prosecutor asks to be sworn in as a witness and proceeds to darken the courtroom so that he can show films taken in the death camps on the day they were liberated. These films are shocking. They are so shocking, indeed, so absolutely overpowering in their gigantic obscenity, that it doesn’t occur to one until long afterward that the defense should have objected to them (throughout the film the defense objects to almost everything the prosecution says), that the judges themselves should have stopped this demonstration, that even the censors in Hollywood should have intervened. One is likely never to have seen such films before, yet having seen them there is no forgetting—ever, for they illuminate, as nothing else quite can, the central fact of modern history: that no class of people—neither women nor children nor friends nor poets—can withstand the combined fury of the cataclysmic political and technological machinery that has emerged from the very depths of our civilization. These mountains of bodies, recognizable faces, sexual organs, beaten children—mountains of them indiscriminately pushed, arms and legs swaying and wagging, by the bulldozer into a pit: what are they meant to remind us of? Not that the four defendants in the film were guilty of certain juridical abuses (we know that they had nothing directly to do with the death camps); not even that only twenty years ago the “most enlightened culture of Europe”—our present allies—had allowed this to happen in its very midst; but that this is how death looks. This is how it looked at Hiroshima (as we are reminded by the defense attorney who argues at one point that the Germans are not the only mass murderers in the world), and this is how it may very well look tomorrow or a year from now unless the “philosophy that enabled the Nazis to come to power [and which] was not unrelated to the motive in their being released” is somehow inhibited.
On the following day, the defense rises to speak and, strangely, still does not question the legal propriety of these films in a trial which technically has nothing to do with the death camps. Instead a few days later he addresses himself to the general question of German guilt in a speech which still has nothing to do with the trial, and even less with the defense of his clients. In this speech he proceeds to implicate the whole world. “Why did [the Nazis] succeed?” he asks.
What about the rest of the world, Your Honors? Did they not know the intentions of the Third Reich? Did they not hear the words Hitler broadcast all over the world? Did they not read his intentions in Mein Kampf, published in every corner of the world? Where is the responsibility of the Soviet Union who in 1939 signed a pact with Hitler and enabled him to make war? Are we not to find Russia guilty? Where is the responsibility of the Vatican who signed the Concordat Pact in 1933 with Hitler giving him his first tremendous prestige? Are we now to find the Vatican guilty? Where is the responsibility of the world leader, Winston Churchill, who said in an open letter to the London Times in 1938—1938 Your Honors!—“Were England to suffer a national disaster, I should pray to God to send a man of the strength of mind and will of an Adolf Hitler.” Are we now to find Winston Churchill guilty? Where is the responsibility of those American industrialists who helped Hitler to rebuild his arms and profited by that rebuilding? Are we not to find the American industrialists guilty? No. Your Honors, Germany alone is not guilty. The whole world is as responsible for Hitler as Germany. It is an easy thing to condemn one man in the dock. It is easy to condemn the German people—to speak of the basic flaw in the German character that allowed Hitler to rise to power—and at the same time comfortably ignore the basic flaw of character that made the Russians sign pacts with him, Winston Churchill praise him, American industrialists profit by him.
This speech is delivered with great vehemence by Maximilian Schell, a German actor who obviously needed little coaching. He plays his part with such intuitively passionate conviction that he alone goes far toward explaining the basis for West German recovery. But his speech for all its force has nothing to do with the defendants and the charges against them. It is instead a part of Abby Mann’s polemic—a set piece intended to tell the audience what the film is really about. Its effect on Judge Haywood (Spencer Tracy) is only to intensify his wrinkles. We all know what his verdict will be and that none of the entreaties of his fellow Americans—not even the recommendation of the prosecutor—will sway him. In delivering his verdict, he echoes the remarks in Mann’s preface:
If . . . the defendants were all degraded perverts—if all the leaders of the Third Reich were sadistic monsters and maniacs—these events would have no more moral significance than an earthquake or other natural catastrophes. But this trial has shown that under the stress of a national crisis, ordinary men, even able and extraordinary men, can delude themselves into committing crimes so vast and heinous that they beggar the imagination. . . .
It seems to me that we are being asked at this point to think of ourselves at the end of World War III in a position similar to that of the defendants—ourselves, ordinary men, perhaps even extraordinary men, who under the stress of a national crisis are acquiescing in crimes beside which Hitler’s will seem small. In case the audience might miss the point, the most reprehensible of the four defendants (an unrepentant Nazi) rises as the judge completes the reading of his verdict and shouts, “Today you sentence us. Tomorrow the Bolsheviks will sentence you.” Which is precisely what the Americans, who had wanted to call the trials off earlier in the film, had been saying.
I must not give the impression that Abby Mann has written a pacifist film in the usual sense. He is not asking us to give up the bomb: simply to look at politics and death. Despite Stanley Kramer’s bulging close-ups and vast floating images, Judgment at Nuremberg is nothing like On the Beach. Nor is Mann suggesting that Americans today have the same relatively simple choices open to them that Germans had in the 30’s. As the film ends and we last see Spencer Tracy, he is walking through the long, grated corridor of the prison in which the trials had been held. His back is to the camera. His shoulders are hunched, and one feels he might be weeping. Certainly he is crushed by what he has seen. But we are not to assume from this that as soon as he gets back to Maine he is going to set up a branch of the Committee for Nuclear Disarmament. Rather one feels that for him, as for us, there is perhaps no place to go, nor is there anything in our dreadful situation so concrete that it can effectively be resisted. But we are also left with the idea that where there is life there is choice, and where there is choice there is also the possibility that we too may one day be called to account for decisions we failed to make, for opportunities that we may have overlooked, for alternatives we were too blind to know were there.
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