Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)

This is a fictionalized telling of the Nuremberg Trials that took place a while after World War II. Basically, the trials attempted to determine if people were responsible for crimes committed by the state. The trial scenes are pretty good, but this movie has tons of stuff outside of court that seems to have little relevance. While it does give the characters more depth, I'm not sure it was necessary as the movie was quite long (over 3 hours). The last scenes in court were very well-done and left a good final impression, but unfortunately the movie continued for another 10 to 15 minutes which sort of soured that.

The acting in this film was outstanding. Marlene Dietrich was pretty good in a role that is probably a starring role. The film also had Spencer Tracy who was quite good and was the most important character in the film. He was nominated for best actor but did not win. The winner that year was Maximilian Schell who was also in this film. Not often does a film get two nominations for best leading actor, but they were both good. I'm not sure who I would have given it to. Schell was probably better, but less important than Tracy. The film also has Judy Garland and Montgomery Cliff who were both outstanding although their roles weren't very big. They both received nominations for best supporting actor but did not win, probably because their roles were too small.

Excellent acting notwithstanding, I wasn't particularly fond of this film. While its use of actual footage of concentration camps is historically significant as the public had not seen much of this footage at the time, the film itself is just too long and has too many irrelevant scenes for it to be great.

70/100
C-

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