One of the most important trials dramatized nicely here by Malek and Crowe.
Just the other day, I watched and admired “Judgment at Nuremberg,” which had an all-star cast of Spencer Tracey, Burt Lancaster, Judy Garland, and William Shatner. It was a fictionalized version of the of the Judges’ Trial of 1947, which was the third of the 12 trials for war crimes the U.S. authorities held in their occupational zones in Germany in Nuremberg.
Another film titled “Nuremberg” is based on the 2013 book “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist,” which focuses on the psychiatrist Douglas Kelley examining Hitler’s 2nd-in-command Hermann Goring to see if he is fit to stand trial. This dramatization doesn’t top the 1961 film, but it does use the right actors to portray these real life figures, and it doesn’t oversell a cliche regarding a prisoner and a psychiatrist. And this prisoner is irredeemable. All of the prisoners at Nuremberg were.
Rami Malek plays Kelley and Russell Crowe is Goring; and the movie starts off having these two with their sessions, which include mind games that Goring passes and magic tricks that Kelley teaches to him. You know-silver dollar behind the ear and card tricks. And the psychiatrist might even write a book about this (his only book would be named “22 Cells in Nuremberg”). But when the trial begins, and footage of the horrors of the Jewish exterminations are shown on film, Kelley is disgusted by what Goring calls “his legacy.”
The goal of the trial is to get the defendants to confess their war crimes, in order to prevent another extermination. And we know that Goring surrendered before hand.
The A-list cast also includes Michael Shannon as the lawyer and politician Robert H. Jackson, who served as the chief U.S. prosecutor of the trials; Leo Woodall as Sgt. Howard Triest, who serves as a translator between Kelley and the convicted Nazis, and was born into a Jewish family; John Slattery as the army officer Burton C. Andrus, who was in charge of the Nuremberg prison; Colin Hanks as another psychiatrist named Gustave Gilbert, who has a falling out with Kelley at one point in the film; Mark O’Brien as the U.S. Intelligence officer John Amen, who served as the Prison Chief interrogator; and Richard E. Grant as the British Conservative politician David Maxwell Fyfe, who was one of the prosecutors of the trials.
“Judgement at Nuremberg” was a little over 3 hours long, while “Nuremberg” runs for about 2 and a half hours. Even though I’ve grown weary of its choice of cliches regarding the main defendant’s family, a woman who seems like a love interest but is more of a side character (and she’s played here by Lydia Peckham), or the obligatory fight scene between the two psychiatrists, but I haven’t grown weary of the history lesson and which side of the story a certain movie wants to portray. The 1961 chooses to have fake names and give a lot of screen time to the judge (the one Spencer Tracey played), while this one chooses to have real names and give a lot of screen time to the psychiatrist and the lawyers.
The movie was written for the screen and directed by James Vanderbilt in his first directing job since “Truth.” If he can help remind people of the nostalgia of the latest “Scream” movies, then he can remind people about this trial and the monsters involved. And he does it without overexploiting the subject, but by guiding actors like Malek, Crowe, and Shannon with the right tone and dialogue. These are the film’s strongest points.
“Nuremberg” is not an easy reminder of what has happened, but it is an informative one that keeps us watching. No magic tricks were used in the making of this review.
