Nuremberg (1925)
Some 32 years ago I attended an international convention in Chicago.
There was a reception out of town and a colleague and I waited for a taxi to take us back to our hotel.
At the pick-up point were two elderly lawyers who already knew one another as they were part of the Prosecution team at the Nuremberg trials.
Their conversation in the taxi that we were invited to share with them was so fascinating that we stayed up with them at their hotel until 2.00 am listening to their memories of the trial.
I kept in touch with one – Henry King – and this generated a keen interest in what has been called ‘the trials of the century’. Henry informed me that the lead American prosecutor Robert Jackson was an appellate lawyer – and therefore inexperienced with cross examination – but the British barrister David Maxwell Fyfe less so.
This film focuses on the relationship between an appointed psychiatrist and Herman Goering whom he profiles. The psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (played by Rami Malek) is reproached for getting too close to Goering (played by Russell Crowe). I have to say that in all my reading and studies of Nuremberg this is the first I have heard of James Kelley.
The film has several key omissions. Goering probably was a narcissus but he was also a serial looter of art and – as head of the Luftwaffe because of his early support of Hitler and rôle in the Munich putsch of 1922 in which he was wounded by gunshot and became a morphine addict – he was also outfought by Hugh Dowding and Keith Park of the RAF in the Battle of Britain, as a result of which Hitler turned eastwards and abandoned Operation Sea Lion.
Getting one of the biggest global movie stars Russell Crowe was clearly a catch and he delivers a fine performance. Famous for “GLADIATOR”, to his credit, he has since has taken on less glamorous roles. I was less convinced by flavour of the month Rami Malek as Kelley, but Richard T. Grant portrayed David Maxwell Fyfe brilliantly: his devastating cross examination of Goering, showing that he must have known what was going on because of the position he held as as Reichsmarshal ,was one of the film’s highlights.
It’s not a film to be enjoyed as much as appreciated – the footage of the concentration camps is too harrowing – and it falls à short of Stanley Kramer’s 1961 “JUDGEMENT AT NUREMBERG”.
