Cinema
Salutary Clangers
Fy ISABEL QUIGLY
Judgment at Nuremberg. (Leicester Square Theatre)— The Young Ones. (Warner). —Island of Shame. (Berke- ley.) THE trouble with Stanley Kramer, it seems clear, is our old friend vaulting ambition that o'erleaps itself, for although his talents are never quite up to his themes, he can't stop puff- ing along behind those enormous questions that everyone else is busily avoiding. For which one cannot fail, if a bit ironically, to take off one's hat to him. In his last film it was the end of the world. This time it isn't quite so cosmic but a lot more immediately inflammable: no less than that tinder-dry subject, the Nazis and their guilt. Judgment at Nuremberg (`A' certificate) stares straight at everything that everyone (in films at least) has been avoiding for a very long time, and says all sorts of embarrassing things out loud, right down to the arch-embarrasser of all— the statement that it's no good being beastly about Nazi guilt when you need, as we do, the help of the present-day Germans.
The pity of it is that thes,e salutary dangers weren't dropped by a better film-maker, who would have made his points more forcibly and given us the clash between morals and people in action ,instead of the thud of attitudes and personalities in debate; for with his huge and awful subject Mr. Kramer has given us a long and lugubrious but not particularly awe-inspiring or illuminating film. There 13 no dash or subtlety about him, not even any technical variety (his only way of emphasising anything at all is to zoom backwards and forwards, as if on a piece of elastic).
But though Judgment at Nuremberg is all too easy to sneer at, there is something to be said for it, all the same. Although it crawls along so slowly that at least one of its three hours could have been done away with, it makes a number of points worth making simply by going over all the points that have ever been made in post- war discussions, and by giving everyone an atti- tude that seems to suit his face. To cast Spencer Tracy as the American judge who spends his eight months at Nuremberg being confused (by Marlene Dietrich, among other more intellectual arguments) and 'finally surfaces in glum certainty to say that quantity isn't what counts in murder or in injustice, and a single example will do as well as millions to make his point, was an ex- cellent notion : because no one better than Mr. Tracey can give an air of wisdom and humility without folksiness (folksily though the character happens to be conceived). To cast Maximilian Schell—handsome, persuasive and at times quite terrifyingly plausible—as the lawyer defending the German prisoners was brilliant; but to cast Richard Widmark as the American prosecuting counsel—with 'fanatic' written on every gesture, bristle and rolling eyeball—was a cheat. Burt Lancaster, as the judge who served the Nazis but (and we are asked to goggle admiringly) told Hitler he was bourgeois, never loses, in spite of a frowsty little moustache, the built-in 'heroism' of this actor's personality (knother cheat). But Judy Garland successfully submerges hers, as a plump housewife who was once the key figure in a notorious Nazi trial, and Montgomery Clift gives an extraordinary performance, worthy of a much finer film, as a man the Nazis sterilised.
Any discussion of the film, indeed, gets down quickly to its acting and its attitudes, both of which are much more important than the direc- tion, in fact swamp it. What counts is the dialogue—not very inspired, but vigorous enough to keep you from napping; whereas the direction, especially in the first half, is remarkably tedious, and actually fuddles and obfuscates what it is trying to say. Inadequacies and irrita- tions are too much a part of the whole thing for one to pick on them: the whole conception of the film is inadequate and its execution often irritating. But there are plums in the pudding— some of the acting, some of the argument, and even Kramer's notion that people will care enough-to listen- to the sort of talk that no one is supposed to want to hear for three hours and three minutes, and several more—before, after and during the interval in which are played• fortissimo, those now terrifying Nazi marching songs.
The Young Ones' (director : Sidney Furie; certificate) is a British musical with,Cliff Richard and Robert Morley, as rather unlikely father and son, the whole thing full of beans but sadly derivative, from corny plot to styles of singing, dancing and speech. A frenetically expressed belief in Youth as something quite distinct from any other stage in human developMent goes strangely with a pack of dancers who all look a bit elderly for a youth club. But Cliff, still as dewy as he was in Expresso Bongo, still as apparently unslicked and urspoiled, is the biggest charmer in the pop business, Melvin Hayes.
a yellow wig, brings a nice surrealist touch to things, and Robert Morley, as the nasty caPitalist, is as stylish as ever Not to be confusea, in fact, with Bunuers The Young One, shown at list year's London festival and now rechristeneJ Island of Shfone ('X certificate), a masterly piece about race hatred and eroticism.
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