Cinema: Show Trial

Judgment at Nuremberg (Roxlom; United Artists). "I do not know the method," wrote Edmund Burke, "of drawing up an indictment against an whole people." The prosecution at the 1946 Nuremberg trials kept Burke's dictum carefully in mind, but such scruples do not inhibit Producer-Director Stanley Kramer (On the Beach) and Scriptwriter Abby Mann, who also wrote the 1959 television play on which this movie is based. Ostensibly, four Nazi judges are on trial. Actually, by vigorous and frequent implication, the German people are on trial, and in a specious process that rivals in travesty the show trials conducted by the Nazis,...