Judging Nuremberg

Director Stanley Kramer loved movies with a message...Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Defiant Ones, Inherit the Wind. He is equally well known for his big, splashy epics with all-star casts, like It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World and Ship of Fools. Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) combines both of Kramer’s directorial strengths in one powerhouse of a film.

Based on a Playhouse 90 television drama with a script by Abby Mann, the film version had to be bigger and more spectacular, so director Stanley Kramer pulled out all the stops by planning location filming in battle-scarred Nuremberg itself and assembling a cast that audiences would pay admission to see in the theaters.

But Judgment is far more than a collection of stars. It provides a group of fine actors the opportunity to lay their Hollywood personas aside and sink their teeth into unusual, once-in-a-lifetime roles.

Burt Lancaster as Dr. Ernst Janning

Rugged Burt Lancaster, whose career had been built as much upon his good looks and athletic physique as his acting talent, plays against type as the aging Dr. Ernst Janning, who signed into law the Nazi edicts that robbed millions of citizens of their human rights. When Janning’s resigned stoicism gives way to regret and contrition, the audience experiences a catharsis that’s a testament to the talents of a truly gifted actor.

Maximilian Schell and Richard Widmark

Handsome Richard Widmark has rarely been better than as the crusading American prosecutor hell-bent on justice for the millions of Jews slaughtered during the European genocide. Self-righteous and angry, hating every moment he must spend in the enemy’s homeland, his demonization of an entire nation of people seems nevertheless justified.

Judy Garland as Irene Hoffmann

Judy Garland, absent from films since 1954’s A Star Is Born and now approaching 40, is compelling in the non-singing character role of hausfrau Irene Hoffmann, who enjoyed a controversially intimate friendship with a Jewish neighbor when back in her teens.  In this small part, Garland is heartbreakingly vulnerable, a bird with broken wings. For this performance, Judy Garland was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress.

Montgomery Clift as Rudolph Petersen

Montgomery Clift channels his inner demons to portray the mentally disabled Rudolph Petersen, whom the Nazi Party ordered sterilized to “cleanse” the population of debility in their quest to evolve into an Aryan super-race. Clift’s startling cameo as the halting-voiced and humiliated victim of inhuman torture is unforgettable.

Marlene Dietrich as Frau Bertholt

Glamorous German ice queen Marlene Dietrich is perfectly cast as Mrs. Bertholt, widow of a convicted and executed officer of the German army, whose home Judge Haywood is given for the duration of the trial.  Her explanation and rationalization of Nazi atrocities summarizes the prevailing post-War German attitude toward the Holocaust: “We did not know.”

Maximilian Schell is passionate and fiery as the young attorney assigned to defend the indefensible. His skillful and articulate direct and cross examinations of witnesses, so beautifully laid out by writer Abby Mann, is highly compelling and almost succeeds in obscuring the architects of the 20th century’s most ignominious tragedies in reasonable doubt.  For his performance, Schell won the Best Actor Academy Award.

Spencer Tracy as Judge Dan Haywood

With his craggy face furrowed and his weary shoulders bowed with profound questions of right and wrong, good and evil, Spencer Tracy brings the full force of his considerable talents to bring the difficult role of the tribunal judge Dan Haywood  to life. Though it’s been often said that Spencer Tracy reduced his own film acting philosophy to one simple rule: “Find your marks and tell the truth,” there is a lot more going on here than mere technique. Tracy’s thoughtful and multidimensional performance is understated yet powerful, but melds beautifully with the introverted method-like work of Garland and Clift and the more representational portrayals of German actors Dietrich and Schell.

Director Kramer’s point of view, as seen through protagonist Tracy, allows every character of the story humanity and dignity, even those who condoned atrocities that robbed millions of those same qualities.

For lovers of courtroom drama and truly great acting, Judgment at Nuremberg is a must-see.

Many Thanks, Robert Altman, Robert Altman

A crumbling relic of the past, which was never built to be anything but a facade in the first place, is far from a foundation on which to base a life and an identity. That’s the theme of Come Back To The Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, the little-seen 1982 film based on a play by Ed Graczyk and directed by Robert Altman. Currently unavailable through any mainstream DVD-on-demand service, lovers of this film must content themselves with scratchy VHS transfers offered by those lucky enough to buy the film when it was still in circulation more than two decades ago. (And thank goodness for that crumbling relic of a videotape which allowed this film lover to enjoy this remarkable little film once again.)

Black, Bates and Cher—Disciples of James Dean

A quirky piece, even for the king of quirk himself, the great Robert Altman (M*A*S*H, The Player), Come Back To The Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean is a forgotten gem of a film, featuring a collection of strong and dimensional women’s roles brought to life by an eclectic group of fine actors. Here is where film fans will find Sandy Dennis in her last great role and superstar Cher in her first, plus startling turns by a young Kathy Bates, Marta Heflin, and a Karen Black as you’ve never seen her before.

Sudie Bond, Sandy Dennis and Cher

Based on a 1976 play by Ed Graczyk, Jimmy Dean takes place in a dusty and arid one-horse Texas town several hundred miles from Marfa, where scenes from the 1956 George Stevens epic Giant were filmed. It is now two decades since these local Texans experienced their brief brush with Hollywood magic, and the members of a local fan club, the Disciples of James Dean, are scheduled to meet at the local dime store where they originally held their meetings, 20 years after Giant and the young star’s untimely death. All that's left of the past are crumbling bits of the fictional Reata Ranch, which Mona collects during a yearly pilgrimage to the long-abandoned film location.

By the late ‘70s, the “well-made play” as popularized by Ibsen and continued by Tennessee Williams and William Inge had fallen out of favor, and Graczyk’s play was considered old-fashioned and derivative with its rhythmic and formulaic uncovering of secrets and revelations, culminating in a transformational climax, but within this well-worn structure actors are allowed to shine.

Edna Louise (Heflin), Mona (Dennis) and Juanita (Bond)

Mona, Joe (Patton) and Juanita

A tense moment for Mona, Joanne and Sissy

Lacking the operatic and often Shakespearean spectacle of Robert Altman’s most well-known films, this one is a curiousity, with its claustrophobic single setting of a faded drugstore interior sweltering in a Texas heatwave. Altman also uses the stage conventions of lighting and the reflection of a mirror behind the counter to differentiate the 1955 flashback scenes with the present action. But fans of the filmed stage play genre will appreciate Robert Altman’s loving focus on his actors. Having also directed the play on the Broadway stage with the same cast, the director chooses to allow them to tell the story.

Sandy Dennis as the high-strung Mona

As the troubled and dreamy Mona, chosen as an extra for a few of Giant’s large crowd scenes and still starry-eyed from her mythic encounter with James Dean, Sandy Dennis gives one of her most layered and complicated performances. Look up the word neurotic in the dictionary and you’re bound to find a picture of Ms. Dennis in any of her iconic film performances, perhaps in her Oscar-winning turn as Honey in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, or as Jack Lemmon’s beleaguered wife in Neil Simon’s The Out-of-Towners. Mona is a crowning achievement for Dennis, who did very few films after this one.

Karen Black reveals an uncomfortable secret as Joanne

The versatile Karen Black, who worked so well with director Altman in the legendary 1975 country music epic Nashville, gives one of the most arresting performances of her career in the difficult role of Joanne, the transsexual visitor who serves as catalyst for the destruction of Mona’s fragile facade of untruth. Joanne’s “Edie Gormé” monologue, delivered while perched against the rusted jukebox, is an iconic moment for Karen Black fans.

Cher's acting debut, as the sassy yet vulnerable Sissy

Jimmy Dean also marks the film acting debut of Cher—no, her appearances with Sonny in specialty movies Good Times and Chastity don’t count! Already a seasoned performer, Cher makes the transition from musical variety to drama seamlessly and skillfully, recreating her stage triumph as the brassy, bawdy and big-bosomed Sissy.

The smaller roles are standouts, too, particularly plaintive-voiced veteran character actress Sudie Bond as Juanita, the hyper-religious proprietress of the drugstore; Altman stalwart Marta Heflin as a shy wallflower, and Kathy Bates as her pushy, loud-mouthed former BFF. The only male role in the story, their gay friend Joe, is played in the flashbacks by Mark Patton. Unseen by the audience is the title character, the supposed offspring of Mona and the movie star, a half-wit who became a cause celebre when used to promote Texas tourism after James Dean’s sudden death.

Watching these wonderful actors work together under the direction of a creative risk-taker like Altman is a joy. Even if this film is ultimately deemed a failure by film historians, it’s an experimental work of of movie art designed for lovers of acting and theatrical storytelling.  

Robert Altman with his stars 

"Sincerely" by the McGuire Sisters

Hitchcockian Dopplegängers, De Palma-style

Brian de Palma’s obvious zeal for voyeurism reached its cinematic zenith in 1984’s Body Double, perhaps the director’s sexiest and most playful film. Written off as one of De Palma’s lesser efforts and mostly forgotten by today’s film audiences, Body Double combines comedy, romance and sex with suspense, thrills and gore.

It’s a titillating Hollywood story of success and failure, juxtaposing the fantastic wealth and luxury of Bel Air and Beverly Hills against the seamy and gritty reality of struggling actors and wannabes, prostitution and pornography. A glossy and seductive mystery punctuated by creative acts of kinky violence, Body Double takes the genre perfected by the original master of suspense and ups the ante under the aegis of an equally visionary auteur.

AA Lautner's futuristic treehouse provides the perfect vantage point for De Palma's voyeurism

Four years after Dressed to Kill, Brian de Palma was still deep in his “Hitchcock period,” and Body Double pays homage to two of Hitchcock’s best, Vertigo and Rear Window, both starring the redoubtable everyman James Stewart.

For Body Double, de Palma cast Craig Wasson, an unconventionally handsome and sensitive blond actor who was making a name for himself at the time, most notably in the 1980 thriller Ghost Story, where he starred opposite Hollywood legends including Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Fred Astaire and Melvyn Douglas. But in an era where pretty boy male ingenues like Tom Cruise and Michael J. Fox and overbuilt he-men like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone ruled the box office roost, Wasson never quite took off as a leading man. But here, he’s perfect...this is Wasson’s defining film.

Craig Wasson as Jake Scully

Like James Stewart’s Scotty in Vertigo, Wasson’s Jake suffers from a debilitating phobia, in this case a fear of confined spaces. An actor in a low-budget vampire movie, Jake is fired when he has a panic attack in his coffin during shooting. Dejectedly, he goes home, only to find his wife Carol in bed with another man. The camera lingers perversely on the lust-glutted expression on Carol’s face as she completes her orgasm even after being discovered by Jake.

Gregg Henry as Sam Bouchard

But things are looking up as Jake is befriended by Sam, a fellow student in his acting class, who offers him a place to stay....an incredible mid-century modern home in the hills with panoramic views of the city which Sam is housesitting for a rich friend. (Sam is played with smarmy charm by Gregg Henry, now a regular on the TV series Scandal.)  All Jake has to do is water the plants...and enjoy the view with the help of a powerful telescope. There are more fringe benefits to the arrangement: an eye-filling show through the window of a neighboring mansion, where the beautiful lady of the house does a slow striptease and sensual dance ending in self-gratification. Nightly.

In an extended sequence where Jake follows the woman on her errands, De Palma takes a familiarly suspenseful Hitchcockian mood and makes it his own. Not only does Jake spy on the woman while she shops for lingerie on Rodeo Drive; he even peeps into her dressing room as she tries on panties and is almost detained by security. Finally, the pair meet. Mystery, murder and mayhem follow in inimitable De Palma style.  

Deborah Shelton as Gloria Revelle

The flat-voiced Deborah Shelton, perhaps trying to imitate Kim Novak’s throaty whisper from Vertigo, is a perfect fantasy for Wasson’s character, with her curvy Playboy-ready physique and diaphanous designer clothes...until she opens her mouth to speak. Then she’s as wooden as a Rodeo Collection mannequin.

Melanie Griffith as Holly Body

Performance-wise, the film belongs to Melanie Griffith, who sparkles as porn star Holly Body. This underrated actress was truly the Judy Holliday of the 1980s, and her infectious laugh, baby-doll delivery and unerringly instinctive sense of timing inject this thriller with a dose of irreverent fun not found in most De Palma films. Griffith’s Holly is particularly amusing in her adult film pas de deux with Jake, with her deadpan delivery of bad porn movie dialogue:

HOLLY

You like to watch?

JAKE

Yeah.

HOLLY

Makes you hot, doesn’t it?

JAKE

Yeah.

HOLLY

Makes me hot, too.

Tightly plotted, with a satisfying climactic twist, so beloved to 1980s thrillers, Body Double is an absorbing film and includes all the sex and over-the-top bloody gore that De Palma fans demand. Lovers of 1980s nostalgia will also appreciate the MTV-like music video sequence featuring Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s sexy megahit “Relax,”  which for me is enough to elevate this visually stimulating horror movie to high camp.

The Misfits: Misfire or Masterpiece?

Dark and downbeat, poignant and profound, The Misfits (1961) is an unflinchingly clinical examination of the inner psyches of a group of disparate unfulfilled characters played against a backdrop of the arid and cheerless Nevada desert, filmed in silvery black and white. To some film fans, it’s a masterpiece of motion picture truth. To others, it’s an unrelentingly dry and joyless two hours and four minutes, difficult to watch in one sitting.

Written by Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman, All My Sons) and directed by the legendary filmmaker John Huston (The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre), The Misfits assembled some of the greatest talents of the mid 20th century for this original story about a group of cowboys whose lives are touched by a beautiful, lonely divorcee. The cast includes Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe (the final film for both stars), Eli Wallach, Thelma Ritter and Montgomery Clift.

The performances are faultless, the characters well-drawn, and some of the language among Arthur Miller’s best and most perceptive observations of the human experience, but this is far from the perfect movie, and the fault rests chiefly with the author himself.

Miller and Marilyn on the set

Miller’s recent years had not been productive or artistically satisfying. He had spent more time fighting House Un-American Activities inquiries into his supposed Communist leanings, and playing nursemaid to a needy and narcissistic movie star wife, than he did creating theater magic. By 1960, his four-year marriage was crumbling. As he adapted his 1957 short story, originally published in Esquire magazine, into a vehicle for Marilyn, he was obviously in a state of deep depression.

Clearly written by a man in need of a prescription for one of today’s serotonin reuptake inhibitors, Arthur Miller’s screenplay for The Misfits is a negative and gloomy tale of lost hopes, unrealized dreams and an inability to change—almost everyone we meet finds their life frozen with regret and despair. Artfully articulated, yes...but entertaining? If you are a fan of fine acting, perhaps.

Clark Gable in his final film role, as Gay Langland

Gable’s portrayal of disillusioned cattle rustler Gay Langland plumbs the depths of the actor’s capacities. He hasn’t had a juicy acting role like this since Rhett Butler, and we see moments of surprising vulnerability from one of Hollywood’s most iconic he-men. The brilliant Eli Wallach is intense and raw as Gay’s sidekick Guido. The reliable and real Thelma Ritter adds a much-needed dose of ironic humor to the often lugubrious proceedings, but she is also touching and wistful as Roslyn’s Reno landlady. Monty Clift’s physically ravaged rodeo rider Perce reminds audiences of the actor’s own horrifying car accident three years earlier, which left him permanently disfigured and hooked on pain medication. His scene in a phone booth speaking haltingly with his mother is among the very best Montgomery Clift moments ever captured on film.

Montgomery Clift as Perce

Veteran character actress Thelma Ritter as Isabel

Eli Wallach as Guido

Roslyn and Gay follow the star that will take them "right home"

Monroe is a revelation as over-30 divorcee Roslyn Tabor. If you’ve never seen The Misfits, this is truly a Marilyn Monroe you’ve never encountered on the screen. Here is one of the few performances in which she was able to fully use her Actors Studio training to realize a character who is more than a cartoonlike depiction of beauty and seductiveness. Monroe’s Roslyn is disappointed with life and can find little to hold onto or believe in...yet her sheer life force has the power to bring magic to the moment.  To use Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio technical jargon, we see Marilyn “make contact” perfectly with her character, particularly in the scenes where she describes feeling abandoned by her mother and let down by her ex-husband. Though Monroe disliked her character and the story, feeling Miller stole intimate details from her own life and their marriage, her performance in this dark film strikes a poignantly incandescent note.

Marilyn Monroe as Roslyn

Much has been written about the filming of this movie, and in the ensuing years the surviving players all seemed to point to Marilyn Monroe as the reason for the film’s failure. Marilyn was difficult. Marilyn was ill—drinking—overweight. Marilyn was late. Marilyn was mean to her soon-to-be-ex. That may all have been true, but the real culprits in the film’s failure to entertain are the author and the director, who were reported to have indulged in countless gambling and drinking binges during location filming in the Nevada desert. The drama offscreen was far more exciting than the action being photographed, and Miller used Huston as a surrogate therapist and confidante as his marriage fell to pieces. 

All the major players involved in putting together this quirky film displayed behavior perfectly in keeping with the movie’s title. It's a fascinating film, but only if you're in a deep and reflective mood.

Three misfits—director Huston, star Monroe and writer Miller

Last dance for Mr. and Mrs. Miller