The first reading for the cast was held on February 15, 1961, four long tables forming a square on Revue’s Stage 28, where the film’s dark-paneled courtroom interior had been erected. Originally, Kramer had wanted to shoot the film in the actual courtroom in which the trials had taken place. “We couldn’t,” he said, “because it’s still in use today. So we took measurements and carefully re-created it on the soundstage in Hollywood, although we finally had to scale down some of the dimensions for the involved camera movements. A courtroom … is a very static set. The attorneys had to be separate and distinct from the defendants and witnesses, by law. So the film becomes a ping-pong game unless you try to move the camera, which I tried—not always successfully—to do.”
The read-through was scheduled for 9:00 a.m. but was late in starting because Maximilian Schell had yet to arrive. One of several holdovers from the original Playhouse 90 production, Schell had prepared for the movie version by reading the entire forty-volume record of the Nuremberg trials.
“Eventually,” said Marshall Schlom, Kramer’s new script supervisor,
Max Schell arrived—he had gone to Western Costume for a fitting or something. When he came in, he didn’t have a script. He said, “I left it in my car.” I had a bunch of scripts, so I helped everybody out. Lancaster came in and sat down and put his glasses on and set his script in front of him. Widmark put his glasses on and had his script in front of him. Judy wasn’t there, Monty Clift wasn’t there, but Bill Shatner was there, all of the defendants, Werner Klemperer and the others, they were all there. There were probably fifteen or twenty in all. Spencer came in with his script; he put his glasses on and he opened his script. The rest of them just left it there, but he opened his script as if he wanted to check something. At that point, Stanley introduced everybody; some of the people knew each other, of course. Everybody was very respectful of Tracy, and it was all very formal. Stanley kept it that way. There was some kind of aura, a feeling we were a step above normal films, that we were doing a film that Stanley felt just had to be made.
Tracy’s part in the film, at least the portions in the courtroom, was fragmented. His part went all the way through, but for a period of time it was just “Would you speak up?” and then six pages later he would have an interjection, and that’s the way it was in the script. So he did the same thing with this reading—he would follow for a while and then he’d remember, “Oh, I think I have a cue coming up,” and he’d look at his script again. Widmark had memorized his whole part—he never opened his script. Lancaster was a gentleman, very eloquent. He sat with the script open in front of him and did it very carefully. Everybody had their own way of doing this reading, but I remember Spencer vividly because he just didn’t have much to do. His major scenes were with Marlene Dietrich; in the courtroom he only had this one speech where he read the verdict.
So Tracy was sort of like a fox that was hiding in the bushes. He played everything very low key. My first impression of him was: Gee, you’re sitting here with Spencer Tracy—you have to be impressed. But he didn’t seem to be this typical big-time actor who needed to be “on” all the time. He didn’t need to impress anybody. And that spilled over into the production, because we eventually had to get everybody into the witness box. They all had to tell their stories, they all had to have their day in court. They all had their turn being in the spotlight, and Tracy was always sitting in the background. By the time we got to Tracy’s work, which was basically the decision, all of the big stars had already had their turns. And he was lying there waiting…
In Abby Mann’s mind, the power of the screenplay depended on an actor of Tracy’s authority in the part of Judge Haywood. “Tracy was the embodiment of America in a way. You think, ‘Well, this is an ordinary guy.’ But like a lot of guys like him, he’s not ordinary.” It was as if a lifetime of careful refinement had prepared him for the role, the summation of an entire career. “Time magazine said that in Inherit the Wind I acted less and less,” Tracy said to Joe Hyams. “Isn’t that the goal? Ethel Barrymore once told me when I asked her about acting, ‘The idea is to be yourself,’ and George M. Cohan said the same thing, ‘to act less.’ I finally narrowed it down to where when I begin a part, I say to myself, ‘This is Spencer Tracy as a judge’ or ‘This is Spencer Tracy as a priest or as a lawyer,’ and let it go at that.”
That said, he bristled at the inference that he was just playing himself. “Who the hell do you want me to play?” he would thunder. “Humphrey Bogart??” And then: “An actor’s personality is, naturally, a part of his performance. Alright, so you like mine. Big deal. Thanks.”
Chester Erskine went on to explain that “what he really meant was, ‘This judge is Spencer Tracy’ or ‘This priest is Spencer Tracy’ or ‘This lawyer is Spencer Tracy.’ He had learned how to bridge the gap between the real and unreal, the objective and the subjective. He did not act, he was.” Tracy, he continued, belonged to a school of art “which believed in selection—not how much the actor could do in any given scene, but how little he had to do to make the point, the constant refinement and editing of a performance until it had reached its minimum to make the maximum, the difference between those two margins being the audience’s own emotional participation.” As John Ford once said of Tracy: “I think he could play anything that he believed in.”
Following a week of rehearsal, getting the company on its feet, Kramer began shooting Judgment at Nuremberg on Wednesday, February 22—Washington’s Birthday. Working in sequence, he completed Scenes 24 through 26 and part of 27, the first scenes to take place in the courtroom at the Palace of Justice.
“The Tribunal will arraign the defendants,” Tracy said, delivering his first lines. “The microphone will now be placed in front of the defendant Emil Hahn.” His other lines that day were equally dry, and work broke off just ahead of Dick Widmark’s opening statement, a scene that would involve some ambitious camerawork. Impassioned and letter-perfect, Widmark’s speech the next day was covered with a 360-degree pan of the camera that took in the entirety of the courtroom and its spectator mix.
“Everyone in the crew had to carry the cables and equipment around in a circle for that,” Kramer explained. “It’s the funniest thing in the world to see happen on the set. Out of the dullness of the situation I circled him in order to pick up Tracy and the judges in the shot without simply cutting. It was just something I worked out—where Widmark’s lines would occur in relation to who is seen in the background. We rehearsed a long time for that—to photograph people just at the right Widmark line.”
Throughout the tedium of the technical rehearsals, Tracy remained in place, patient and compliant. “All you can do,” he said of the inherently static nature of the action, “is play it. The big difficulty in this picture is in Mr. Kramer’s lap as a director.”
Widmark’s scene was followed by Maximilian Schell’s equally impassioned opening statement for the defense. Testimony began with Widmark’s examination of actor John Wengraf, playing Ernst Janning’s former law professor. “When we started to shoot,” said Marshall Schlom, “Tracy would come in and do the off-stage shots as well. When he was off stage, he would say, ‘Come sit next to me.’ And then he would say, ‘Nudge me when I’m supposed to say something’ because every five or six pages he had to say something like, ‘Objection sustained.’ ”
Marlene Dietrich was on hand from the beginning, observing on the stage and distributing cookies and danishes to cast and crew members, some of whom had worked with her when she made Destry Rides Again on the Universal lot in 1939. She had no substantive scenes in the courtroom; it is, rather, Mrs. Bertholt’s former house in Nuremberg that Haywood is assigned as a residence during the course of the trial. He comes upon her for the first time in the kitchen, where she is retrieving some of her belongings.
At age fifty-nine Dietrich was playing an athletic woman in her forties. “She was nice,” said Widmark, “but she used to drive Tracy crazy. He didn’t use makeup and she had to fix
up to the nines. He’d go nutty waiting to do their scenes together.” Hepburn, with her father, was touring the Middle East—Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan—leaving Tracy to pass the time with Dietrich between shots. “She was very respectful,” said Marshall Schlom. “She liked being the star attraction normally, but with Tracy there she knew her place … She was a good cook, apparently, and she loved to be friendly and shmooze and laugh and be joyful. Around Tracy, though, she was much more sedate, quieter, letting him have the stage.” Dietrich would later describe Tracy in her autobiography as “the only really admirable actor with whom I worked.”
Tracy began talking of retirement again, saying another picture would be anticlimactic after Judgment at Nuremberg. He turned down Otto Preminger, who wanted him for Advise and Consent, and was also said to have been Harper Lee’s choice for Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Bob Yager remembered a telling remark that Tracy made to photographer Phil Stern, who was shooting The Devil at 4 O’Clock in Hawaii for Globe Photo. Stern had taken some pictures of Tracy—portraits—and when he showed him the prints he said, “I think they’re very, very good character shots of you.” Tracy examined the images impassively. “When you get to my age,” he said, “it is hard to say when a picture is a wonderful character study or when it’s just a picture of an old man.”
As expected, he drew another Oscar nomination for Inherit the Wind, even as Fredric March, another two-time winner, was shut out of the running. Tracy was clearly pained by the omission, even as he sought to distance himself from the proceedings. “I have to admit to you—Freddy—that I am wondering a bit if maybe the votes were tabulated in Cook County…,” he wrote in acknowledging his costar’s gracious wire of congratulations. “But I thank you—a good Democrat—for giving me the benefit of the doubt—and how I miss you in the daily entanglements of Stanley Kramer’s camera moves.”
To press such as Pete Martin or Joe Hyams, Tracy rarely missed an opportunity to alienate the voting membership of the academy. “I care about a great many things,” he told Martin, “but I sure as hell don’t give a fiddler’s damn about the Academy Awards, and I was honest from the beginning. I never did. When I was winning it, and when I was nominated a great many times.”
Nor did he buy Martin’s suggestion that a nomination somehow brought paying customers to see an otherwise underperforming film. “I was nominated for Old Man and the Sea,” he said, “which grossed fifteen dollars, seven of which they found in the aisle. I was nominated for Bad Day at Black Rock, which was not a success at the box office. It has nothing whatever to do with it. Maybe the awards, but the actors nominate. And the actors nominate if they think you give a good performance. What the hell has the picture got to do with it? Nothing. Not a goddamn thing.”
Tracy in his rented home on the George Cukor estate. The chair was an old horsehair rocker that Hepburn had reupholstered. (HEARST COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA)
Nevertheless, Columbia pulled The Devil at 4 O’Clock from its scheduled summer release, spotting it instead for the fall, presumably in the belief that by now any Tracy performance, regardless of the material behind it, merited a nomination.
Montgomery Clift paced the floor of his room at the Hotel Bel-Air, struggling for words. “I can’t really answer you honestly,” he said. “I was offered $300,000 for another role. That would have been the highest per diem ever paid. But what I did, I don’t consider it—what’s the word? I knew it yesterday … altruistic. It’s not altruistic on my part. People milk pictures, and I felt for this role which was to be shot in four days … Why did I do it? I really don’t know.”
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 what it should be. I got a call on Saturday morning from Monty Clift. He said, “Monday, I’m going to do my part over again. Can you give me an exact copy of what I said? I want to do the same words, and I want to know exactly what I said. Can you furnish me that on paper?” I said, “Okay.” So I made a hasty call to the cutter and said that I needed to come in and transcribe exactly what was on film. Monty said, “Would you send it to my hotel?” I did what he asked for, and I sent it to him by courier
… and Monday morning he came back in and he re-did it and it was a different performance.
Carefully, Clift adjusted his dialogue, scratching out Mann’s fussy stage directions and reconfiguring his lines to make them more disjointed—not complete sentences but rather bursts of painful memory, irrationally arranged. “He was bound and determined to do a better job,” said Schlom, “and he was so emotional. He was a real basket case. I think nothing Stanley or maybe even Tracy could have said to him would have calmed him down. Fidgeting, fidgeting, forever fidgeting. I was rather new to movies at the time, especially big-time movies, and I was nervous for him too.”
It was torturous to watch Clift as he worked his way through the scene that day, but all the anguish ultimately proved to be worth it. “It was marvelous,” said Widmark.
Judy Garland brought her own circuslike atmosphere to the set, arriving early and drawing applause from the cast and crew. “I wanted Julie Harris for the part,” Kramer remembered. “I was about to start dealing for Julie when I opened the newspaper that night. There was an item in it about Judy Garland. I even forget the item. But I said to myself, ‘Stanley, what’s the matter with you? Judy Garland is the actress you want. She knows the suffering I want.’ ”
Garland was cast as Irene Hoffman, a woman who was sent to prison for having an affair with a sixty-five-year-old man who was Jewish, a part played on television by the Czechoslovakian actress Marketa Kimbrell. Garland reportedly worked weeks with a coach to perfect a slight German accent, and her tearful testimony was as gut-wrenching as Clift’s. When she completed her five-minute scene, there was again applause.
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