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Film · United Artists · 1961

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Judgment at Nuremberg

75Worth an evening.

Worth an evening and the talk after. The question is what the judges knew, and when a law is a crime.

The review

An American judge who thinks of himself as ordinary is brought to Nuremberg to try German judges. The charge is not that they were soldiers. The charge is that they used a bench to strip people of standing and then to imprison and kill them, and that they knew. The defense is order, country, and the claim that a judge applies law rather than making it. The film is long because the claim deserves a long answer and does not survive one.

I would clear an evening for this before almost any other picture of these years that pretends to be serious. Older teenagers can take it if they can sit still for talk. Ask, when a defendant says he was only applying the law, what the law was for. A house that cannot answer that can be talked into anything by a statute. The film's answer is not subtle, and it should not be. Subtlety is what the defendants were counting on.

Journal

Keep Judgment at Nuremberg in the record.

No house has filed a sentence for this yet.

Live Historic number 75. Yours can differ.

The glance

Household is the thin one.

Is a marriage, a parent, or a child a real life here, or just a prop?

This phone is set for a grown person, just me. Change the ages.

Consider this

A Man for All Seasons

89 instead of 75

A Man for All Seasons is still a drama film, and it scores 89 instead of 75. What you gain is household: He loves his house and still will not buy it with a lie.

The eight

8
Industry
A trial is work: testimony, translations, and a record nobody in the room may fluff.
4
Household
The defendants have families and marriages that accommodated the sentences.
7
Piety
Conscience is the subject. A vow to the law is weighed against the people the law was aimed at.
8
Courage
Witnesses speak what it would be safer to blur, and the presiding judge does not blur it.
9
Republic
The debt is the definition of the picture: a public, a bench, and the unprotected.
7
Temperance
It refuses spectacle. The length is the patience of a proceeding, not a production number.
9
Truth
Orders are not allowed to mean innocence. The film makes the defendants say what they did.
8
Stewardship
A house inherits a standard: there is a point at which applying the law is the crime.

Where to watch

Finding the page.

Live Historic · Judgment at Nuremberg · 75IMDb tt0055031

Live HistoricSee what matters.

Film · Prime Video · 1957

Pass it on

12 Angry Men

75Worth an evening.

Keep it. A room, a reasonable doubt, and the courage to be the first no.

The review

Eleven men want the afternoon back. The twelfth wants the testimony walked through, because a life is not a schedule. The film is a whole civics lesson in one sweatbox: prejudice with a smile, prejudice with a shout, and the slow work of looking at a knife and a train schedule until the story the state told no longer holds. Nobody is romanticized for being angry. The quiet man is not a saint. He is simply unwilling to be rushed into a killing.

A teenager should see this before they see another thriller about a genius detective. Justice here looks like staying in the chair. That is a picture this house can use.

Journal

Keep 12 Angry Men in the record.