Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [482]
At the Berlin premiere of Judgment at Nuremberg. Left to right: Tracy, Montgomery Clift, Judy Garland, and Stanley Kramer. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
Many felt the film too long, but Friedrich Luft, a German theater critic, found it a “fair and human statement” of the problems of responsibility and guilt for war crimes. “I think people in Germany will accept it.” Conversely, Wolfgang Will, who reviewed the picture for the West Berlin tabloid BZ, thought it went much too easy on the Nazis. “This is a fable of Nuremberg, a downright counterfeit,” he wrote. “Much worse things happened at those trials than what was portrayed.” According to a report in the Los Angeles Times, four German papers praised the film, one condemned it, and a sixth was noncommittal.
Tracy and Hepburn departed for Paris via chauffeured limousine, only to be denied access to the Autobahn that crossed East Germany because Tracy lacked a visa. The car detoured back to East Berlin, a distance of thirty-eight miles, to comply with the requirement, and they weren’t finally ensconced at the Raphael until well past dark. Continuing on to Le Havre, Tracy boarded the liner United States for New York, leaving Hepburn to catch a flight to London.
In Los Angeles, the West Coast premiere of Judgment at Nuremberg was a benefit for John Tracy Clinic, with George Cukor, Walt Disney, Burt Lancaster, Ronald Reagan, Dinah Shore, and Robert Young listed among the twenty-five members of the ticket sales committee. With seats selling for twenty-five and fifty dollars each and former Vice President Richard Nixon heading the guest list, the sold-out event raised $50,000 for the clinic. Louise, escorted by John, hosted a champagne reception in the theater’s lobby after the film and spoke briefly of the clinic’s work: “It is a place where parents of deaf babies and young children may come for encouragement and guidance to help their children.”
The trade reviews, which appeared in October, were admiring and respectful, even as the film’s length and top-heavy casting—for which Abby Mann later took some of the blame—were called into question. As the Variety review stated from the top: “The reservations one may entertain with regard to Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg must be tempered with appreciation of the film’s intrinsic value as a work of historical significance and timeless philosophical merit. With the most painful pages of modern history as its bitter basis, Abby Mann’s intelligent, thought-provoking screenplay is a grim reminder of man’s responsibility to denounce grave evils of which he is aware. The lesson is carefully, tastefully, and upliftingly told via Kramer’s large-scale production.”
Internationally, the film was playing in thirty-six cities by Christmas of 1961. However, with its initial U.S. engagements limited to New York, Los Angeles, and Miami Beach, most Americans learned of the movie through the national magazines, many of which gave Kramer and the picture full marks for intent and delivery. Henry Luce’s Time (which in 1939 had named Hitler “Man of the Year”) was an exception, accusing Kramer of cynically timing the release of his movie to coincide with the reading of the verdict against Adolf Eichmann. In Show, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., pondered the extent to which movies could serve as a medium for the intelligent discussion of complicated problems and pronounced the film brilliant but confused. “It has the raw force of an eloquent pamphlet without clear direction or logical conclusion.”
Unfortunately, one of the film’s key showcases, with more than seven million readers, was in the pages of Look, where Tracy’s 1960 interview with Bill Davidson, killed after the failed release of Inherit the Wind, was raised from the dead and reslotted for the