Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [475]
He was speaking to a writer for the Los Angeles Times who had asked him why he had chosen to make Judgment at Nuremberg for nothing. “Maybe you can tell me,” Clift said to the man. “You look brighter.” The Times’ Don Alpert suggested that perhaps he just wanted to. “I feel so embarrassed,” the actor responded. “I really feel embarrassed. Nobody understands that. I wanted to play it. Deeply. As in D-E-E-P-P-P-L-L-L-L-Y. But you see, that’s so far from the conscience of people here. They think it has to be for publicity or something.”
Clift was still embarrassed when he arrived on the Revue lot, sporting a “very bad haircut” because he believed the awkward man he was to play, Petersen, would have gotten a special haircut before testifying against war criminals.
“Monty Clift came in at nine o’clock,” Marshall Schlom recalled,
and there was a hush on the set. What a troubled man he was. And all of us knew that. He was very nice, but you could tell he was frail. He was a shell of what he used to be. He came in and Stanley shook his hand—there were warm welcomes—and he sat him down in the witness box. Monty had a thermos, which we all figured was coffee. We started to do some lighting, and Stanley was talking to him, and then Stanley walked away. Clift opened up the thermos and poured … and it wasn’t dark liquid. It was liquor; it was a sidecar (which I found out later). He poured this into the lid of the thermos, and he held it for a second and looked at it. And then he felt three hundred pairs of eyes on him. He looked up and he looked around at all of us watching him, and he said, “Fellows, I’m sorry. I need this.” It tore our hearts out.
Clift’s scene was the testimony of a man sterilized by the Nazis because he was deemed “mentally incompetent.” Widmark’s examination concerned the events leading up to the procedure, including a 1933 attack on the family. “Some S.A. men broke into our house,” Clift recounted. “They broke the windows and doors. They called us traitors and tried to attack my father.” Widmark delved into the examination that stemmed from Petersen’s later application for a driver’s license, Kramer’s camera circling Clift to show the entirety of the courtroom, the faces of the listeners—Tracy, Widmark, Schell, Lancaster.
“They asked me, ‘When was Adolf Hitler and Dr. Goebbels born?’ ”
“What was your reply?”
“I told them I didn’t know, and I didn’t care either.”
His uncertain response to the laughter in the room is to smile weakly, his wide childlike eyes darting to all sides.
“Montgomery Clift was at a very, very low point in his life at this time,” Widmark said. “He was drinking a lot. I think he was on dope. And after twelve o’clock you couldn’t use Monty … he’d have to go home, he was out of it. But I remember, especially one morning, I was the lawyer interviewing Monty and he couldn’t make it, he couldn’t remember, he couldn’t put two and two together, and he was just a total mess. And Tracy just said, ‘Talk to me. Play it to me, Monty. Just look at me and play it to me.’ You know, he was like a pop, you know, real, sweet, nice pop. And Monty kind of…‘Okay.’ And he played it to Spence and it came out great.” Said Kramer: “Spencer was the greatest reactor in the business. Monty did play to him, and the words poured out of his mouth—the results were shattering.”1
On the set of Judgment at Nuremberg. Left to right: Richard Widmark, Tracy, Montgomery Clift, and Burt Lancaster. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
There was trouble in Schell’s cross-examination, when his character, Rolfe, asks Petersen a simple question the Health Court always asked: Form a sentence from the words “hare,” “hunter,” “field.” Petersen’s grappling with the question prompts a meltdown, one of the most difficult scenes in the entire picture.
“This happened on a Thursday,” Marshall Schlom remembered.
Friday, we went to dailies, and Stanley wasn’t happy with them. He invited Monty to come in and look at them, and he agreed that it wasn’t