If you know me by now, after reading thousands of my posts on The Audient, you know I don't like deviating from the rules of my monthly series. (Or this could be your first time here, so you're hearing this for the first time.)
However, you should also know that I don't like failing the stated goals of my monthly series just because I made a mistake.
That mistake was to have miscalculated the 12th highest ranked movie on my Flickchart. Smoke Signals, which I watched back in January, was actually my 13th highest ranked one-timer.
The issue arose because I listed the top 15 movies in a Letterboxd list. Why 15? I wanted some extra titles in there in case I couldn't locate all 12, so I could then dig into my reserves.
But I discovered last month that I'd listed them in the wrong order on that list, so a higher ranked movie was below Smoke Signals, requiring me to fit 13 movies into a 12-month schedule.
So I handled that in a way that seemed appropriate: I put the one that was up next, and the one that I had missed, into a double feature to write about this month, which was fitting because they are both about Nazis.
And so it was that on Sunday I watched a "day-night double feature" -- borrowing that term from baseball's "day-night double header" -- of my #167, Oliver Hirshbiegel's Downfall (2004), and my #141, Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg (1961).
If you think that's a lot of movie for a double feature, you're right -- 335 minutes worth. However, Downfall's 156 minutes actually made it the shortest of four movies I rewatched this weekend, which also involved the rewatch of Caligula I wrote about in my last post, as well as Avengers: Endgame with my son, as the conclusion of our series of about eight Marvel movies leading up to it. I should probably write about that, but to be honest, my conclusions from the final film were not very interesting, and I already sort of covered that topic in this post.
I thought it would be good to watch Downfall and Judgment at Nuremberg exactly in that order, for maximum possible schadenfreude, to use the appropriate German term. These are two films that never for a moment depict the Nazis in anything but their very worst hour. Most movies you watch about Nazis feature some moment when they are defiant, victorious, and in the midst of carrying out cruelties toward Jews, the mentally handicapped, homosexuals, and others. In these two movies, they are only paying the price for those cruelties.
I first watched Downfall almost exactly ten years ago, in June of 2016. I raced to Letterboxd to give it an immediate five stars, and when I ranked it on Flickchart, which was likely not immediate because I've been behind on my rankings for some time (maybe even a decade), it placed comfortably within my top 200. Even more comfortably than its current spot of 167 -- my records show that its initial entry in my chart was at #138.
Many people know Downfall because Bruno Ganz ranting as Hitler became a meme, and rightly so -- it's a great rant. (He has several, but there is one that's most famous.) But I hope that doesn't mean Downfall is accorded any less prestige in the public sphere than it deserves.
My impression of the movie on this watch is that its like a procedural for the end of a regime. Hirschbiegel has spared no detail on the downward spiral of the movements of key Nazi officials in a Berlin bunker, and to a lesser extent, their diminishing armies on the ground level. We know much of this comes from the memory of a real person -- Traudl Junge, played by Alexandra Maria Lara -- so we know Hirschbiegel and a trio of screenwriters (including Junge) did not have to just imagine what likely would have happened. But the accuracy of these details still has a sort of brilliant exactness to it, a combination of what did happen, and what must have happened, based on our general knowledge of these true believers specifically, and any cornered, doomed human beings generally.
Even though all the characters we meet are Nazis, the film does a good job giving us some characters we can root for. We know from opening footage of the real Traudl Junge that she regrets her inability or unwillingness to understand what was going on right in front of her face, but that doesn't mean the film goes out of its way to depict her doubts. In fact, her loyalty to Hitler is such that she even appears ready to stay and potentially commit suicide with the rest of them. Maybe it's just Lara's sympathetic eyes, but to the extent that we can excuse any of these people of any of their actions, we feel like maybe she really didn't know just how evil the Fuhrer was. The other truly sympathetic character is a doctor played by Christian Berkel.
Nearly every big name in the Third Reich makes some sort of appearance or other here, and we get a sense of the nuances in their differing personalities as well. All are damnable, of course, but we feel a slight surge of support for the characters we see defy Hitler -- and even feel a weird sort of respect for those who didn't abandon him, as they at least show a strange courage in knowing they are marching to their deaths.
Although the rant is the scene most people know from Downfall, easily the most chilling scene is the one where Magda and Joseph Goebbels (Ulrich Matthes and Corinna Harfouch) sentence their own children to death. First they make them drink a bitter liquid that is pitched to them as preventing them from getting sick in the "humid" bunker (though the youngest child points out, poignantly, that it's not humid). The oldest daughter, fearing a nameless sort of doom but surely not understanding what is actually going on, resists this with all her strength, leading a doctor on hand to force it down her throat. Then there's the impossibly awful scene where Magda goes through the bunks of the anesthetized, sleeping children and one by one helps them bite down on a cyanide capsule. The movies lingers in this moment, showing us each child individually meeting their doom, just so there's no chance we can mistake how monstrous this was. In a film in which actual acts of Nazi barbarism are not otherwise emphasized, this is the key scene of the film.
I didn't re-read my previous post on Downfall before writing the above, but it does cover a lot of the same topics, even using some of the same language. I mean, ten years ago me is still me. If you want to read that piece, it's here.
Judgment at Nuremberg is the newest film in my top 12 favorite films on Flickchart that I'd seen only once -- not in terms of its release date, but in terms of when I saw it. The film is 65 years old this year, making it actually one of the oldest of my one-timers, but I only saw it for the first time three years ago, in July of 2023. And of course immediately wondered where Judgment at Nuremberg had been all my life. I didn't actually write about Nuremberg on the blog previously, having written about if for Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta at the time. So I only have memories of what I wrote in that piece, though I could probably look it up on Facebook if I really wanted to.
Like Downfall, this too is a procedural, only in the courtroom rather than in a Nazi bunker. One of the things I found most interesting about that process is the realistic portrayal of the way people of different spoken languages understood what each other were saying in that Nuremberg courtroom. They did this by wearing headphones, into which were being piped real-time translations of the others' words. The movie does eventually put everything in English so an English-speaking audience can understand it all, but the film makes it clear that this is a narrative device, and it never stops using the headphones, even when all the actors are speaking English.
There is no actual connection between Downfall and Judgment at Nuremberg in terms of the characters, though I did learn from my earlier Downfall piece on The Audient that Albert Speer, the character who defies Hitler's orders, actually apologized for the Nazi atrocities at the Nuremberg trials. He's not a character here, though, as this trial focuses only on four judges who sentenced innocent people to death, with many of their crimes even coming before the war started.
One of the things that compels me the most about this movie is the convincing portrayals of American actors playing Germans. These include Burt Lancaster, Judy Garland, and most touchingly, Montgomery Clift, who plays a mental simpleton who was rendered sterile by the Nazis' unforgivable medical policies toward people who were anything less than pure, undamaged specimens of their Aryan ideal.
The movie really belongs to the solemn Maine judge played by Spencer Tracy, Dan Haywood, the film's moral center, who is the shining example of the jurisprudence that underpinned these trials. He receives this responsibility with enormous gravity, understanding the likely guilt of the men on trial, but unwilling to just make this the sort of empty show that these same men presided over when they sentenced innocent men to death. He's truly eager to understand the finer points of what happened, and you can see the struggle on his face the whole time, even as he is developing the closest thing this film has to a romantic relationship with the widow (Marlene Dietrich) of a man who had earlier been executed as the outcome of a similar trial. Even though as an empathetic human being -- and even possibly as a man attracted to Dietrich's character -- he might be inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt in that she didn't know anything, he never lets her off the hook. He knows these issues are thorny but he also knows that the earnest pleas of these people's innocence does not mean they were actually innocent.
I'm sure there's a lot more I could say about Judgment at Nuremberg -- I wanted to mention also that Maximillian Schell, as the judges' lawyer, is magnificent -- but I've got a trip to prepare for (more on that in the coming days) so I will leave off there. I'll just finish by saying that these two five-star films gave me a lot to think about on Sunday, and I was never bored for a second of their combined 355 minutes.
We'll be back to just a single movie in June, however, that movie could have been part of a triple feature of long movies about potentially sympathetic Nazis during World War II. That movie will be Wolfgang Petersen's 1981 film Das Boot, which I believe has multiple versions, but IMDB says it's "only" 149 minutes. I feel for sure that I saw a longer one back in 2019, but I'll take whatever version I can find of my #124 film on Flickchart.
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