Judgment at Nuremberg.

Produced and directed by Stanley Kramer; written by Abby Mann; starring Spencer Tracy, Maxmilian Schell, Marlene Dietrich, Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, and Richard Widmark. DVD, B&W, 186 mins. An MGM Home Entertainment Release.

Stanley Kramer's reputation has never recovered from the body blow delivered by Andrew Sarris in The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968. Among the gallery of celestial artists and nether-worldly hacks in his hierarchical compendium, Sarris consigned Kramer to the catchall dumping ground of "miscellany" rather than the berth made for him over in "strained seriousness," dismissing Hollywood's liberal standard bearer not just with the harshness of the critique but in the brevity of the brush-off. It reads in full: "If Stanley Kramer had never existed, he would have had to be invented as the most extreme example of thesis or message cinema. Unfortunately, he has been such an easy and willing target for so long that his very ineptness has become encrusted with tradition. He will never be a natural, but time has proved that he is not a fake."

Snickered at by cultural hipsters and lefter-than-thou politicos alike, Kramer remains the antithesis of the renegade auteur beloved by the Cahiers du cinema crowd and their stateside acolytes. A middlebrow American version of the despised French Tradition of Quality, his oeuvre reeks of literary respectability and didactic purpose, never transgressively cutting edge, always safely 'controversial.' (By 1965, did anyone really have to guess who was coming to dinner?) He may have hired blacklisted screenwriter Nedrick Young (and featured him in a knowing cameo in The Defiant Ones [1958]), but he got cold feet about openly defying the blacklist (as he boasted he would) and withheld Young's true byline from Inherit the Wind (1960). Lately, Kramer's stock has fallen further with accusations, leveled in Lionel Chetwynd's documentary Darkness at High Noon: The Carl Foreman Documents (2002), that he exploited the season of HUAC witch-hunting to steal the production credit from screenwriter Carl Foreman for High Noon (1952).

Judgment at Nuremberg is ur-Kramer--serious topic, serious presentation, and serious length (178 minutes, sans overtures). It is also worth taking seriously--as a crisp, sometimes crackling courtroom drama and an authentic cultural milestone. The release of a "special edition" DVD provides an apt occasion to look anew at the cinematic chops and social conscience of a demeaned director.

Besides Kramer's admittedly heavy hand, Judgment at Nuremberg bears the weight of two cultural historical contexts: its 1948 setting and its 1961 release date. 1961 was also the year of the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem, the original Court TV deathwatch, and the publication of Raul Hilberg's landmark study The Destruction of the European Jews, the first comprehensive guidebook to the bureaucracy of genocide. (In fact, playwright Abby Mann scooped both the lsraelis and the scholarship: Judgment at Nuremberg first came to the screen as an episode of CBS's Playhouse 90, originally telecast on April 16, 1959.) Together, the trial, the book, and the film not only turned popular attention toward what was not then called the Holocaust, but three media-cum-courtroom testimonies also reoriented the nature of the inquiry. Shunning the inexplicable why for the methodical how, all the texts were procedural and explanatory in outlook: how the machinery of death worked, how the bureaucracy churned along, how the deed was done.

Mann's inspired conceit was to focus on the moral and political dynamics of the second, less famous round of Nuremberg Trials, a hook suggested to the writer by Nuremberg prosecutor Telford Taylor. With the big fish sentenced and hanged in the widely covered First Nuremberg Trails of 1945-1946, the defendants in the sequel are drawn from the ranks of middle-level management. But the ordinary Germans are not the only suspects on trial. Like the Nazi judges, the Allied tribunal is in the dock, weighing justice against political expedience. In 1948, the year of the Berlin Airlift, and in 1961, the year of the Berlin Wall, the realpolitik pressure on the scales of justice was not a law-school exercise. Kantian in its insistence that true moral action exacts a high price, the film unfolds as a courtroom drama with two sets of defendants, or three including the spectator.

Our guiding light and moral compass is Judge Haywood (Spencer Tracy), audience surrogate and incarnation of American decency, a "rock-ribbed Republican who thinks Franklin Roosevelt was a great man." Saddled with a Puritan conscience and a Yankee backbone, the judge is determined not to be a doppelganger for the men on trial. Tracy savors his role as the ethical ratiocinator-folding his hands, stroking his chin, adjusting his glasses. On the streets of old Nuremberg, a German hooker nails him with a brazen glance. He gives her a wistful half shrug, as if to say 'Alas, fraulein, we both know I am no longer in the market'-and then deflates another notch upon learning that her farewell whisper translates as, 'Goodbye, Grandpa.'

In his Oscar-winning performance as defense counsel Rolfe, Maximilian Schell is the most virile and magnetic figure in the courtroom. Strikingly handsome, coiled for counterattack, his flowing mane of jet-black hair a rebuke to the close-cropped Americans, he defends not just his client but the whole German people. As the only unfamiliar face on the screen, and the only Axisborn actor among an Allied cast, Schell seems to be fighting for more than his share of screen space. His cross-examinations provide the peak theatrical punches to each testimony-notably when he hectors a mentally challenged witness to construct a sentence from the words "Hare-hunter-field." And Rolfe has a case to make; Mann's tribunal is no kangaroo court.

The rest of the cast list is a roll call of long-in-the-tooth motion-picture stars, with the memory of World War II meshing with a homage to Hollywood's lost glory days, an impulse also expressed in Darryl Zanuck's celebrity-strewn D-Day epic The Longest Day (1962). As Ernst Janning, the esteemed jurist corrupted by the Nuremberg Laws, Butt Lancaster stands silent as a stone statue for most of the film, a restrained, almost self-sacrificial performance. The presence of Marlene Dietrich, the staunch anti-Nazi and tireless emissary to American GIs, is incongruous but irresistible. As the widow of a German general executed for war crimes, she is a Good German lady who disdains the Nazis as vulgarians, not murderers. "We did not know," she hisses in answer to the judge's unspoken question. "As far as I can make out no one in this country knew," he replies. Whatever: the scene where Dietrich sings a verse of "Lili Marlene" and explains the lyrics to the judge is utter hokum and pure magic.

Two ghosts of Hollywood past are called to the stand for testimony. Playing a man neutered by the Nazis, Montgomery Clift is wrenching: the extratextual vibes from the former matinee idol, horribly scarred by his automobile crash in 1956, are almost palpable--stammering, off balance, a shell of his former self. Less felicitous is Judy Garland as the former madchen who allegedly committed sex crimes with an elderly Jewish man back in the mid-1930s. Dowdy, puffy-faced, and histrionic, she is twenty years too old and twenty beats off-note for the part. (As an unrepentant Nazi fanatic, Werner Klemperer--soon to go on to syndicated immortality as Colonel Klink, the buffoonish camp commandant in Hogan's Heroes--is a surreal instance of media ricochet.)

As the real presiding officer in the courtroom, producer-director Kramer orchestrates some nice moments, some imported from the teleplay, some original to the film. At the outset of the trial, in an economical cheat that sidesteps subtitles or simultaneous translation, the camera closes in on the German-speaking Schell and the actor switches into English without missing a beat. A conversation among the defendants in the prison mess hall coolly analyzes genocide as a problem of waste management. Intercut with newsreel footage of bombed-out, rumble-strewn cityscapes, the location shots of Germany--in 1961, still looking very postwar--do more than relieve the claustrophobia of a closed courtroom set. In the open air, everyone seems to be walking on ashes, the past forever present, never more so than when Judge Haywood strides through the vacant expanse of the Nuremburg Youth Stadium, haunted by the bark of the fuhrer and the cheers of the multitudes--just the sounds not the footage--a riveting moment of audio callback.

Yet the cinematic trump card can only be imagistic: the unspooling of the newsreel footage of the death camps, projected in 16mm in the courtroom and narrated with tightlipped rage by the Army prosecutor Col. Lawson (Richard Widmark). The Nuremberg trials marked the first time motion-picture evidence was used in court, though Judgment at Nuremberg was not the first time it was excerpted in Hollywood cinema (the footage also clinches the cases in Orson Welles's The Stranger [1946] and Sam Fuller's Verboten! [1959] ).

Throughout, the unrushed, deliberate pacing of the film bespeaks a steady confidence in the material and the audience impossible to imagine in today's hyperkinetic atmosphere. In retrospect, too, no less striking is the stern verdict Kramer and Mann hand down. The old American jurist and the pretty German widow will not, as the judge knows, overcome their differences as if they were characters in a magazine story. Nor will Judge Haywood bestow a parting benediction upon Judge Janning as a matter of professional courtesy. Hard-nosed and unforgiving, Judgment at Nuremberg lives up to its title and case law.

Alas, it would not be a Kramer film without the bludgeon of heavy-handed symbolism to concentrate the attention of the slower students in the audience. In the German present, a well-mannered, refined people are valiantly staging piano concertos and beaming with gemutlichkeit charm ("More strudel, gentleman?"). In the German past, a genocidal regime murders millions. When a rousing gasthaus sing-along is punctuated by thumping beer steins, expect a match cut to a pounding gavel in the courtroom. Yes, at any moment, the happy yolk might burst into a chorus of "The Horst Wessel Song."

The DVD package itself is a disappointment. Given the wealth of potential wraparound features, the misbilled "special edition" is stingy in the way of extras. Karen Sharp Kramer, Kramer's widow, contributes a loyal reminiscence (the director himself died in 2002). A gracious conversation between Abby Mann and Maximilian Schell, both men still dapper and elegant, drops a few tidbits of backstage information. Schell reveals that Marion Brando wanted to play Rolfe in the film, but Kramer, thank God, stuck by the German.

The choice extra conspicuous by its absence--a missed opportunity presumably due to copyright restrictions--is a copy of the Playhouse 90 original directed by George Roy Hill. The television version (not live, as Mann and Schell remember, but on videotape, the format that tolled the death knell for live TV drama) starred Claude Rains as Judge Haywood, Paul Lukas as Janning, Melvyn Douglas as Col. Lawson, and Schell as Rolfe. Though best known for a notorious instance of bonehead censorship (the sponsor, the American Gas Association, demanded that several utterances of the word "gas" be bleeped from the dialog track), the small-screen version is well worth resurrecting in its own right. Interestingly, Mann and Schell recall the Hill version with more fondness than the Kramer version. Both agree that Lukas was better as Janning than Lancaster.

In 1949, as a hot young producer riding the success of Champion and Home of the Brave Kramer told a trade reporter, "I expect to fall on my face from time to time, but I hope I can average out." He did better than average--and deserves better than a glib entry in the miscellaneous file.